President Trump voiced frustration Saturday with rising COVID-19 case counts as both the U.S. and many states have reported new record totals in recent days.
“Cases, Cases, Cases! If we didn’t test so much and so successfully, we would have very few cases,” the president tweeted. “If you test 40,000,000 people, you are going to have many cases that, without the testing (like other countries), would not show up every night on the Fake Evening News.”
Trump said that the media has an appetite for reporting on more cases but doesn’t report that “deaths and the all important Mortality Rate goes down.”
Over the past month, coronavirus spikes have popped up across states including Arizona, Texas and California, and this week, the U.S. reported its highest single-day new case total.
Administration officials have blamed the surges on increased testing, but health advocates have pointed out that rates of positive tests are also increasing.
At an indoor campaign rally in Oklahoma last month, Trump suggested that the country should test less so the number of cases wouldn’t increase, a statement his press secretary later said was a joke. Trump insisted both that he was being sarcastic and that he doesn’t kid around about testing.
Experts have tied the recent dip in mortality to several causes, such as the fact that more young people are being infected now than at the start of the pandemic, while warning that fatality surges are likely to follow the waves of new infections.