The website’s title echoes the National Debt Clock, a billboard-sized running display near Times Square in Manhattan that shows the US gross national debt and Americans’ share of the debt.
Under the “Trump Death Clock” headline in black on the website, a count of American lives lost is listed in red, bolded letters above the phrase: “Estimated US COVID-19 Deaths Due To POTUS Inaction.”
“I am seeking accountability for reckless leadership,” Jarecki told the Guardian Wednesday. “We have meticulously isolated just that portion of the US death toll where one can see a specific line between the president’s decisions and actions and the loss of life.”
The current American death toll listed on the website as of Tuesday afternoon is 48,940.
According to Jarecki, the figure is calculated as 60% of the total US COVID-19 deaths, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. The 60% ratio is used because two epidemiologists - Britta Jewell of Imperial College, London, and Nicholas Jewell, a professor of biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley - told the New York Times in April that they believe that had Trump established social distancing guidelines on March 9, instead of March 16, the total US death toll would have been reduced by 60% compared to the current number.
“I believe we need a national measure of the cost of the recklessness of the president’s pandemic response,” Jarecki said. “He was advised multiple times by the intelligence services and his own public health experts of the significance of this pandemic and the need to take mitigating action, and yet those warnings were not acted upon.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has similarly admitted that establishing lockdown measures in February instead of March would have saved American lives.
"I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" in mid-April.
"Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated. But you're right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then,” Fauci added.
When asked if he was anxious about how Trump could respond to the website, Jarecki said: “I can’t think about that. I feel I owe it to people who lost their lives to demand accountability and more responsible leadership going forward so that they did not die in vain.”