A viral Facebook post shared over 18,000 times claims Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said that if he was president, there would have been zero COVID-19 deaths.

Verdict: False

There is no record of Biden making the statement. It appears to be a misrepresentation of a comment Biden made at a CNN town hall in September.

Fact Check: 

As Election Day approaches, social media has become replete with misinformation about the presidential nominees for both parties. This particular Facebook post claims, “Biden said that if he had been President, not one person would have died from Covid-19.”

But there is no record of Biden making such a remark. Check Your Fact looked through Biden’s social media posts, as well as his press releases and speeches, and didn’t find any instances of Biden making the statement. Nor have any media outlets reported that the former vice president said the quote.

The claim appears to stem from a Sept. 17 CNN town hall, where Biden said that if Trump had “done his job,” there would have been zero deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. Over 212,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 to date, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

“And if the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive. All the people — I’m not making this up, just look at the data. Look at the data,” Biden said. (RELATED: Viral Post Claims To Show Joe Biden Violating Social Distancing Guidelines)

Biden’s claim that zero people would have died from the coronavirus pandemic if Trump had “done his job” has no data to support it, according to The Washington Post. Countries that have had relative success in managing the pandemic have still experienced deaths. For instance, South Korea, a country that’s initial pandemic response was widely praised, has seen over 400 deaths from the coronavirus despite strict mitigation measures, The New York Times reported.

“I think it’s impossible to say every life could have been saved,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told Politifact.