United States President Donald Trump on Monday said that his country has the biggest testing programme for the coronavirus in the world that is much better than countries such as Russia, China and India. “We test more than anybody by far, and when you test, you create cases,” Trump said.

Speaking at a roundtable at the White House, Trump claimed that the US has one of the lowest mortality rates in the world. “We are doing very well with vaccines, and we are doing very, very well with therapeutics,” Trump added. “And I think we’re going to have some very good information coming out soon.”

United States is the worst-affected country from the pandemic in the world. More than 34 lakh people have have tested positive for Covid-19 in the US so far and over 1,37,000 have died, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

But Trump said the number of coronavirus cases is going up because testing is increasing. “I can tell you that some countries, they test when somebody walks into a hospital sick or walks into maybe a doctor’s office, but usually a hospital,” he added. “That is the testing they do, so they do not have cases, whereas we have all these cases. So, it is a double-edged sword.”

United States has conducted 45 million tests so far, Trump said. “If we did half that number, you’d have half the cases, probably – around that number,” he claimed. “But we have the best, and certainly the biggest – by far, the biggest testing program anywhere in the world. If you tested China or Russia or any of the larger countries, if you just tested India, as an example, the way we test, you would see numbers that would be very surprising.”

Trump once again hit out at Beijing for the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and said what China “did to the world” should not be forgotten. “I think what China has done to the world with what took place – the China plague – you can call it the China virus, you can call it whatever you want to call it,” he said. “It has about 20 different names. What they did to the world should not be forgotten.”

Trump has been incessantly attacking China over the coronavirus outbreak, referring to it as the “Chinese plague”. In May, he accused Beijing of deliberately “not stopping the plague” that their country spread throughout the world. “Spokesman speaks stupidly on behalf of China, trying desperately to deflect the pain and carnage that their country spread throughout the world,” Trump had added.

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