The President of the United States, Donald Trump, considered it “stupid” for his country to do so many tests to detect covid-19, seeming to defend its reduction, the day after the US registered a new record of contagions.
At a rally this Saturday in the state of North Carolina, Trump took advantage of the media for “not stop talking about the covid-19” and boasted that “the data” about the pandemic in the United States “is incredible”, despite the daily record of more than 85,000 new cases on Friday
“Do you know why we have so many cases? Because we do a lot of tests. And in many ways, this is good, and in many others, it is stupid. In many ways, it is very stupid, ”said Donald Trump, in the city of Lumberton, the first of the three rallies he has planned for today.
“If we cut the tests we do in half, the cases would halve,” added the President, stressing that the United States “spends a lot of money on testing.”
Trump claimed that the amount of tests being carried out reveals many cases and this “gives the false media something to talk about”, which is not convenient for him in the election campaign, where his management of the pandemic is one of the key issues.
In a message on Twitter a few hours earlier, Trump said that the increase in covid-19 cases “includes many low-risk people”, and accused the media of “doing everything possible to create fear before 3 November”, date of the elections.
Experts deny Trump’s argument that cases go up simply because more tests are done, because that logic does not take into account the fact that the percentage of positive tests has increased by more than one percentage point since early October, up to 5.8% currently.
In total, the United States has now passed 8.5 million cases and recorded more than 224,400 deaths since the pandemic began, more than any other country, according to Johns Hopkins University.
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