President Donald Trump sought to downplay the numbers associated with COVID-19 in the United States — which have passed 2 million confirmed cases and are nearing 120,000 lives lost — by arguing that the soaring national count was simply the result of superior testing.
“If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases,” Trump said at a June 15 roundtable discussion at the White House. “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
It’s a talking point the administration is emphasizing. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated it during a phone call to Republican governors that evening, recommending they use the argument as a strategy to quiet public concern about surging case tallies in some states. It’s also a variation on a tweet the president sent earlier in the day.
With that in mind, we wanted to dig deeper. We reached out to the White House for comment or clarification, but we never heard back. Independent researchers told us, though, that the president’s remarks are not only misleading — they’re also counterproductive in terms of thinking through what’s needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
THE BIG PICTURE
Essentially, the president is arguing that the United States is finding more cases of COVID-19 because we are testing more — and that our increased testing makes it appear the pandemic is worse in the U.S. than in other countries.
“We will show more — more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do; they just don’t talk about it,” he added.
