The U.S. hit a sad milestone yesterday in the coronavirus pandemic: 200,000 deaths. We’ll leave the debate over the statistics themselves for other places, other than to say this is a number everyone feared but hoped wouldn’t come. Unfortunately, it’s also a highly politicized number.

The Associated Press report, for example, reads like a Joe Biden press release: “The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 200,000 Tuesday, by far the highest in the world, hitting the once-unimaginable threshold six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.”

“By far the highest in the world”? The AP doesn’t mention China’s stats, perhaps because they’re totally unreliable and bogus. But that hasn’t stopped media outlets from mindlessly repeating Beijing’s numbers without question.

“Once-unimaginable”? That comes from a crowd that fearmongered about the early and questionable model predicting two million American deaths. And the AP neglects to note something The Heritage Foundation discovered: “Just 1% of the counties in the U.S., representing just over 18% of the population, are responsible for almost half of the country’s COVID-19 deaths.”

While the AP does eventually note how the virus “swept into nursing homes,” claiming nearly 80,000 lives, the report says nothing of an order given by New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo greatly exacerbating that problem.

The reason for the AP’s distortions, however, is painfully obvious in that first sentence: “six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.”

Speaking of Trump, the president gave a prerecorded address to the UN General Assembly Tuesday, and he put blame exactly where it belongs: The Chinese Communist Party government.

“We must,” he declared, “hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China.” He continued:

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, we are once again engaged in a great global struggle. We have waged a fierce battle against the invisible enemy – the China virus – which has claimed countless lives in 188 countries.

In the earliest days of the virus, China locked down travel domestically while allowing flights to leave China and infect the world. China condemned my travel ban on their country, even as they canceled domestic flights and locked citizens in their homes.

The Chinese government and the World Health Organization — which is virtually controlled by China — falsely declared that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Later, they falsely said people without symptoms would not spread the disease.

The United Nations must hold China accountable for their actions.

On Monday, Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report detailing Beijing’s deception about COVID. “It is beyond doubt that the [Chinese Communist Party] actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” the report says. “Research shows the CCP could have reduced the number of cases in China by up to 95 percent had it fulfilled its obligations under international law and responded to the outbreak in a manner consistent with best practices.”

In fact, the report concludes that if China had acted responsibly, “It is highly likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented.”

So despite efforts by the unholy alliance of the Democrat Party and the Leftmedia to pin blame for the pandemic on Donald Trump, Democrat officials bear far more responsibility for domestic results than he does, and ultimately it’s not called the China Virus for nothing.