6th June, 2020
President Donald Trump said India and China would have had higher COVID-19 cases than the United States if they had conducted more tests.
Speaking at a medical manufacturing facility in Maine, Trump Friday claimed the US had tested over 20 million samples for the disease so far.
The US is the worst-hit by the pandemic, in terms of both deaths and infections.
The country has reported nearly 1.9 million cases and over 109,000 fatalities, according to the data by Johns Hopkins.
India, on the other hand, has reported 236,657 cases and 6,642 deaths.
China, where the coronavirus was first detected, has registered 84,177 infections and 4,638 deaths.
“We will be well over 20 million tests. Remember this, when you test more, you have more cases. I say to my people every time we test, that you find cases because we do more testing. If we have more cases, if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you there would be more cases, Trump was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
Trump also compared the US’s testing rate to Germany, which he said had tested four million samples, and South Korea, which he claimed had done about three million so far.
According to India’s Health Ministry, India has conducted over 4 million coronavirus tests so far.
Speaking at Puritan Medical Products, Trump repeated that Covid-19 was “an enemy” from China.
“It is indeed an enemy. It came from China, should have been stopped in China. They didn’t do that,” he alleged.
Trump described the fight against the pandemic as the greatest national and industrial mobilisation since World War II and said his administration had marshalled the full power of the US government and US industry to defeat the “invisible enemy”.
“We slashed the red tape to speed up the development of vaccines. And vaccines are coming along incredibly well, wait till you see, and therapeutics.
“And we partnered private sector leaders such as Puritan to build the largest and most advanced testing capacity on the face of the earth, like this one.”
He added that his administration had delivered over 1.5 billion pieces of personal protective equipment to doctors and nurses on the front lines.