Pence, Harris face off in VP debate with diverging views of America

Highlights from the first and only matchup between Biden, Trump's running mates

With plexiglass and more than 12 feet of distance separating them, Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic nominee Sen. Kamala Harris of California debated in Salt Lake City in the first and only one-on-one matchup between the vice presidential candidates.

The showdown came as President Donald Trump and several in his orbit have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, raising questions on a transfer of power to the vice president were Trump at 74 -- or Democratic nominee Joe Biden at 77 -- to become too ill to serve.

The debate's format was divided into nine 10-minute sections with each candidate having two minutes to respond to the opening question in each segment and the remaining time allowed for follow ups. Moderator Susan Page, Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, did not release the topics in advance.

The sole vice presidential debate follows Trump and Biden's chaotic debate last week in Cleveland.


0

FACT CHECK: Pence on COVID-19 testing, PPE

PENCE'S CLAIM: Pence said that Trump's decision to impose travel restrictions from China, ultimately "bought" the U.S. "invaluable time" to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, reinvent testing capacity and deliver billions of supplies to doctors and nurses.

FACT CHECK: Although the U.S. has conducted more COVID-19 tests than any other country, according to experts, testing capacity is still not vast or fast enough to serve all the people who need to get a test.

Additionally, although billions of items of personal protective equipment, or PPE, have been delivered to frontline workers across the country, the United States continues to experience shortages of PPE and testing supplies, according to a Sept. 21 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

In April, Trump said that the U.S. would be conducting up to 5 million tests per day, "very soon." However, the national 7-day average of coronavirus tests has yet to surpass 1 million, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

To date, the U.S. has conducted over 120 million COVID-19 tests, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
More testing will, of course, identify more cases.

However, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, there are several countries that have conducted more testing per capita than the U.S., but also have fewer cases per capita than the U.S. does -- such as the U.K., Spain and the United Arab Emirates. Those figures reflect all-time averages of daily tests conducted per capita -- and the daily percentage of tests that come back positive, which is known as the "positivity rate" or the "percent positive rate."

Despite having one of the highest rates of tests per capita, the U.S. faces the largest outbreak in the world and new cases continue to trend upward in many states. The percent positivity in the U.S. remains over 4.7%, when other countries with high testing figures report a significantly lower percent positivity rate, according to Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, the shortages of PPE and testing supplies are due to high global demand and the fact the domestic production of supplies is limited. According to the Government Accountability Office, "testing supply shortages have contributed to delays in turnaround times for testing results.

ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos

"Delays in processing test results have multiple serious consequences, including delays in isolating those who test positive and tracing their contacts in a timely manner, which can in turn exacerbate outbreaks by allowing the virus to spread undetected," the report read.

--ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos


Final candidate speaking times 

ABC News calculated of the candidate's approximate speaking times during more than 90 minutes on the debate stage, :

Pence: 35:22
Harris: 38:48

ABC News also calculated the approximate speaking times spent on each topic including moderator speaking time:

COVID-19:-11:58
Role of the vice president: 9:27
Economy: 9:20
Climate change: 9:23
Foreign policy: 12:34
Supreme Court: 10:02
Race: 10:35
State of the election: 6:52

--ABC News' Kelsey Walsh


Trump tweets Pence ‘WON BIG!’

Shortly after the debate wrapped, Trump -- known to enjoy his time in front of the television -- signaled his approval of Pence's performance and declared him the winner in a tweet.


The Trump campaign also released a statement in which Pence's chief of staff Marc Short said the vice president made the argument to the American people that Trump is "the clear choice to rebuild the economy."

--ABC News' Terrance Smith


Pence’s pink eye and an errant fly grab social media attention

Social media users clamored to point out that Pence's eye looked red and enflamed, which led to speculation about his health after being exposed to COVID-19 from the president.

ABC News' Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton weighed in, saying that pink eye has been reported in anywhere from 11% to 30% of COVID-19 cases. But as always, Ashton said that it is not possible to diagnose anyone from television and that it was a possibility that it could just be that he just had "some makeup in his eye."

An errant fly that landed on Pence's head during the debate also grabbed the attention of social media users. The Biden campaign immediately seized on the moment, using it as an opportunity to fundraise, posting a tweet asking for donations to "help this campaign fly," along with a photo of Biden holding a fly swatter.


FACT CHECK: Pence overstates China travel restrictions

PENCE'S CLAIM: "Before there were more than five cases in the United States, all people who had returned from China, President Donald Trump did what no other American president had ever done. And that was, he suspended all travel from China, the second-largest economy in the world."

FACT CHECK: At the end of January, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation to restrict travelers who had visited China in the previous 14 days from entering the United States, but it was more narrow than Pence described. The orders did not apply to U.S. citizens, green card holders and their close family members. Health care workers were also exempt.

Nearly 760,000 people entered the U.S. from China between December of last year and February, according to an ABC News review of traveler data.

Restrictions on travelers from Europe started in March. An April study from researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found the first coronavirus cases in New York originated from Europe, not China.

--ABC News' Quinn Owen