President Trump in an early morning tweet Monday repeated his claim that the U.S. leads the world in coronavirus cases because of the country’s level of advanced testing after quipping during a Saturday night campaign rally that he had directed testing to be slowed.
“Our Coronavirus testing is so much greater (25 million tests) and so much more advanced, that it makes us look like we have more cases, especially proportionally, than other countries,” Trump tweeted. “My message on that is very clear!”
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people. You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’” Trump said at the rally in Tulsa, Okla., the president’s first since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
While the White House has said the comments were in jest, Trump has made similar comments on testing before, suggesting in May that it was “overrated.”
“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” he also said during a White House event last week.
And the same week, he tweeted: “Our testing is so much bigger and more advanced than any other country (we have done a great job on this!) that it shows more cases. Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases. Testing is a double edged sword – Makes us look bad, but good to have!!!”
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has said increased testing alone does not account for the increased number of cases of the virus in the U.S., pointing to an increased positivity rate for testing. These higher percentages, Fauci told The Wall Street Journal last week, “cannot be explained by increased testing.”