Tom Brady was called out by PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter for claiming suicide deaths outpaced COVID-19 casualties in recent months

• Tom Brady received a "False" rating on PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" on Tuesday.
• The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback claimed in an Instagram story that there have been "more suicide deaths than coronavirus deaths [in the] last two months."
• According to PolitiFact, "there are no national numbers that back this up" and that "it is impossible for the suicide rate to have increased to surpass the COVID-19 death rate."

Tom Brady may be thriving on the gridiron in recent weeks, but he's having a bit of trouble hitting his targets off the field.

On Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback posted an Instagram story from his personal account in which he declared that there have been "more suicide deaths than coronavirus deaths [in the] last two months."

But according to PolitiFact — a fact-checking website run by The Poynter Institute — Brady's claim has no basis in fact.

In an article published Tuesday, PolitiFact senior correspondent Jon Greenberg debunked the Super Bowl champion's claims, citing data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID Tracking Project, and the Quarterly Journal of Medicine to do so.

The most recent reliable statistics on death by suicide came from 2018, when an average of 4,026 reported suicides occurred every month in the United States. By contrast, COVID-19 has killed at least four times that amount of people in each of the last several months. And though there's no data available to determine whether or not there's been an uptick in the rate of deaths by suicide each month, President of the American Association of Suicidology Dr. Jonathan Singer says that an increase that significant is "just impossible."

"There's no way this can be true," he added.

According to Greenberg, roughly 19,000 Americans died of the novel coronavirus back in June, a month in which he reports that COVID-19 deaths in the US were falling. As a third wave of the pandemic picks up steam in the country, approximately 22,000 people are dying of COVID-19 each month.

For this reason, PolitiFact rated Brady's claim "False," adding that "there are no national numbers that back this up."

Check out Brady's inaccurate story from Tuesday below:

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