World watches as Trump flubs and fakes stats in Fox interview
President, Trump, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, suggested the media focus more on the situation of COVID-19 in Mexico and less on that of the US and insisted that in time the new coronavirus “will disappear”.
Trump, reports EFE again minimized the impact of COVID-19 in the United States, the country leading the world with the highest number of infections and deaths from the disease, with more than 3.7 million cases and more than 140,000 deaths, and where infections are growing at a fast pace in several of the most populous states.
“It is what there is … It is not just about this country, it is happening in many countries, but they don’t talk about it in the news. They don’t talk about Mexico and Brazil and still parts of Europe, where [ the coronavirus] came earlier, “Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
“Why don’t they talk about Mexico, which is not helping us? All I can say is that, thank God, I built almost the entire wall because if I didn’t have the wall we would have a much bigger problem with Mexico,”
Trump spoke in this way despite the United States having recorded eleven times more cases and almost four times more deaths from coronavirus than Mexico, whose tally is almost 340,000 infections and more than 38,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The Wall
This is not the first time that Trump alleges that the “wall” he is rebuilding on the southern border has slowed the entry of COVID-19 from Mexico, something he also claimed during a visit to Arizona in June without providing evidence or details.
His new statement comes just over a week after he received Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the White House for a meeting in which both leaders praised bilateral cooperation in the face of the pandemic.
During the Fox interview, Trump attributed the acceleration in the number of confirmed infections in the US to the number of tests that are carried out in the country, which has become “the envy of the world” in this regard, and said that many of those infections accounted for “should not even be (considered as) cases”.
“Many of those cases are young people who would heal in one day. They have a little cold and we count it as a test,” he lamented.
The president also affirmed that the United States has “one of the lowest death rates in the world,” something that the interviewer, journalist Chris Wallace, contested, recalling that, according to the Johns Hopkins analysis, the country is the eighth in the world in that index, above at least twelve more nations.
According to that university, if you analyze the number of deaths for every 100 confirmed cases, the US has fewer deaths than the United Kingdom, Mexico, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq and Brazil; but more than Peru, Kyrgyzstan, Bolivia, Colombia, the Philippines, Chile, India, Pakistan, Argentina, Russia, South Africa and Bangladesh.
Asked about his February statement that COVID-19 “will disappear” one day ” as if it were a miracle,” the president insisted: “At some point I will be right. It will disappear, and I will be right.”
Trump said that he does not agree that “if everyone wore a mask, this would disappear,” despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week that if all Americans put on that protective facepiece the coronavirus would be “under control” in eight weeks.
The president said that “masks also cause problems”, without clarifying what he was referring to, and he opposed the idea of decreeing their compulsory use because he wants people to have “a certain freedom”.
And days after one of his economic advisers, Peter Navarro, attacked in an oped article the main government epidemiologist, Anthony Fauci, Trump assured that he has a “very good relationship” with that infectious disease expert, but added: ” He’s a little alarmist. “
