Donald Trump just throws out claims that are not based on facts, but he appeases his base and that’s all that matters to the president with the election right around the corner. While Trump addressed the nation on Tuesday, he claimed that five million COVID-19 tests will be carried out in the U.S. per day. Literally everything Trump says has to be scrutinized since the president has a penchant for lying.
Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health who is in charge of the government’s testing response, told TIME that that goal just wasn’t possible. “There is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests a day,” Giroir said.
He explained that the Trump Administration has conducted 5.7 million tests since the start of the year, in total. Giroir further said the White House’s new “blueprint” for testing that was launched on Monday, currently plans to double current COVID-19 testing. Giroir said he plans to hit eight million tests per month by next month. That’s a far cry from Trump’s claim of testing five million Americans per day.
After a reporter on Tuesday asked the president if the U.S. would reach five million daily tests as a Harvard study recommended, Donald Trump responded to say, “We’ll increase it, and it’ll increase it by much more than that in the very near future.”
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The reporter asked Trump to clarify if the president meant the country would “surpass 5 million tests per day.” Trump responded, “We’re going to be there very soon,” but offered nothing to back that up, as usual.
Unsurprisingly, Covid Tracking Project data does not back up Trump’s wild-eyed claims either. According to the data, the most significant number of tests that were conducted by the U.S. in one day was 314,182. That means to meet Trump’s claim, the U.S. would have to increase testing by 1,500 percent.
The aforementioned is the reason why an expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci is so popular with Americans who are trying to get facts on the disease instead of braggadocious nonsense. Gov. Cuomo’s polls have soared because the public wants to hear the truth amid the national crisis. Trump should follow their lead, but he thinks he knows more than everyone, including the experts.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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