Trump Insists U.S. Does Not Have Highest Coronavirus Death Toll: ‘The Most in the World HAS to be China’

At the daily coronavirus briefing, President Donald Trump took a question about the veracity of Chinese government’s reports on the coronavirus death toll to insist, absent any evidence, that that country must have more deaths than the United States.

According to the latest data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the U.S. death toll currently stands at nearly 37,000, while the China number, which was just revised upward by 50% to account for previously uncounted patients who died at home, now totals roughly 4,6oo.

A White House reporter noted this revision in a question to the president on Friday, before asking: “Does that sound like a credible number to you?”

“Well, you know, when I listen to the press every night say: ‘We have the most…’ We don’t have the most in the worlds deaths,” Trump began, launching right into a unsubstantiated claim that, to be true, would require the China number to be revised upward again by more than 700% just to surpass the current U.S. total. And while China has been widely criticized for failing to alert W.H.O. and other global health officials about the true nature of the virus in the initial weeks of the outbreak, there is no evidence that the country is engaged in a massive cover-up of tens of thousands of deaths.

“The most in the world HAS to be China,” Trump insisted. “It’s a massive country. It’s gone through a tremendous problem with this, a tremendous problem. And they must have the most. So today I saw they announced that essentially they are doubling up on the numbers. And that’s only in Wuhan. They are not talking about outside Wuhan. So, it is what it is. It is what it is.”

Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, was the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak and where a vast majority of the cases and deaths occurred. Any revisions to the mortality data outside Hubei would likely be much smaller than the latest correction.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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