And what about McAuliffe’s Oct. 7 comment that 1,142 children were in ICU beds? That number seemed totally off-kilter. (For the week ended Oct. 2, the number of children in hospitals, not necessarily in intensive care, was just 35.)

The McAuliffe campaign said that he simply misspoke. Okay, we moved on.

But then he said it again, on Oct. 21: “We’ve just 1,142 children in serious, in hospitals, in ICU beds.” That was still wrong: on that day there were only 334 people (of all ages) in ICU beds in Virginia, according the state health department data.

(McAuliffe also said “we just had 4,000 cases yesterday here in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” which again appears to be a weekend total, though he was speaking on a Thursday. Virginia has not experienced more than 4,000 confirmed or probable cases in a day since Sept. 20.)

A week earlier, on Oct. 13, McAuliffe used a slightly different figure regarding children, but it was still too high: “Today, 1,100 children are in hospitals here in Virginia.” The confirmed hospitalizations for all ages on that day was 1,471, and of course a smaller percentage of children get really sick with covid-19 than adults.