US President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday in his thesis that if the United States is the country that has more cases of COVID-19 worldwide, it is because it performs many more tests than other countries and therefore more are detected infections
“The cases are increasing in the United States because we are doing more tests than any other country and we continue increasing them,” the president wrote on his Twitter. “With a smaller number of tests we would show much fewer cases,” he insisted.
According to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, the United States remains the country most affected by the pandemic with 2.31 million people infected and 120,402 fatalities, after registering 31,000 cases in the last 24 hours.
The president had already generated controversy last Saturday during his speech at the election rally held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thus, he said that the COVID-19 tests are “a double-edged sword” by increasing cases in the country.
“This is the bad part … when you test so many people, you are going to find more cases. So I told my people to please delay the tests,” said the president, causing a senior administration official to have to then go on to point out that he was “obviously kidding.”
However, in recent hours, Democrats have accused the Administration of not having yet disbursed almost $ 14 billion to help state and local authorities conduct tests and follow up on contacts.
The Democratic leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer, and the party’s top representative in the Health commission, Patty Murray, have sent a letter to the Secretary of Health, Alex Azar, demanding the “immediate” distribution of said funds, which form part of the package of more than 25,000 million dollars approved in April by Congress
“This Administration will put our country in grave danger if it tries to declare an early victory, leaves vital work undone and leaves untouched resources that our communities desperately need,” the two Democratic senators have defended, according to the news portal The Hill.
For this reason, they request that the 8,000 million of the package of 25,000 for which there are no disbursement plans yet be distributed “immediately”, placing particular emphasis on monitoring contacts and collecting data on the racial and ethnic disparity of COVID-19. , as well as the 2,000 million destined to pay the cost of the tests, of which hardly anything has been unlocked.
