The President of the United States, Donald Trump, offers a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 14, 2020.
Jim Watson | AFP | fake pictures
President Donald Trump again insisted Tuesday that the United States would have fewer cases of coronavirus if it conducted fewer tests, even as outbreaks continue to rise across the country and deaths begin to accelerate.
“Think about this, if we didn’t do tests, instead of evaluating over 40 million people, if we did half the tests we would have half the cases,” Trump said at a White House press conference. “If we did another one, it halved, we would have, once again, half of that. But the headlines are always on trial.”
Trump said that while coronavirus tests “are a good thing,” they have also served as “fodder for fake news to report cases.” He said that if the United States did not evaluate people for Covid-19, then you would not have “all headlines” because the nation has one of the lowest death rates.
“When I turn on the news I see cases, cases, cases,” Trump said.
The United States has more cases of coronavirus than any other country in the world, with more than 3.4 million of the approximately 13.3 million global cases. While the United States has conducted more tests than any other country, it also has the highest number of deaths: 136,300 of the approximately 576,800 deaths in the world. Covid-19 deaths, which had been on the decline in the United States for nearly two months, recently began to rise again, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Average daily deaths in the United States peaked in mid-April at more than 2,400, according to a seven-day moving average. The deaths had since decreased, hitting an average of just over 500 a day on July 4, but have since increased to an average of 700 Covid-19 deaths on Monday, according to Hopkins data. .
Across the country, more than a third of US states reported record highs in new daily cases, based on a seven-day moving average as of Monday, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Hopkins. Twenty states, including Florida and Georgia, broke records Monday with an average of 10,855 and 3,358 new cases, respectively.
As cases continue to rise, laboratories across the country are lagging behind in the processing and delivery of test results, according to two of the country’s largest laboratory diagnostic companies.
“We attribute this demand primarily to the rapid and continuous spread of COVID-19 infections across the country, but particularly in the southern, southwestern and western regions of the country,” Quest Diagnostics said in a statement.
Hospitalizations across the country, which epidemiologists say may show the most serious outbreaks, as they are not reliant on testing, continue to set new records that indicate widespread community transmission. On Monday, 14 states broke bleak records in seven-day average hospitalization numbers, including Texas, California and Arizona, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Covid Monitoring Project.
– CNBC’s Nate Rattner, Jasmine Kim and Will Feuer contributed to this report.
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