Donald Trump Plays Down Number Of Coronavirus Cases In The US In Tweet That Makes him Sound Like A 12 Year Old
You’d think that with how often US president Donald Trump uses Twitter, he has some sort of stake in the company or something. The US president has once again taken to the social media platform to express his thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic and no surprises here, he’s once again tweeted something that’s factually incorrect.
The president took to Twitter on Wednesday to let the world know that the only reason the US has reported one million cases of the CoronaVirus (that’s how he spells it) is because testing in the country is “sooo much better than any other country in the World.”
Not content with that, he goes on to add that “Other countries are way behind us in Testing, and therefore show far fewer cases!”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1255352014042738688
Now, you don’t have to be a genius to know that there’s no way thats true. You’re probably wondering how on earth Trump had the audacity to make a claim like that, right? Well, I think he’s taken the fact that the US has conducted more tests than any other country in the world waaay out of context.
As it stands, the US has seen 1,028,217 positive cases of the coronavirus, with 59,446 deaths. As of the 27th of April, the country has conducted 5.57 million tests, which is indeed waaay ahead of any other country in the world, but does that warrant the title of best in the world at testing? I don’t think so.
The US is home to 328.2 million people as of 2019. 5.57 million represents 1.69 percent of the population, which is actually up there, but still behind Italy’s 2.98 percent.
Yup. I hear you, the US is huge, but the country’s resources are also vast. Getting test labs up and running should and could have been done a lot sooner. 5.57 million out of 328.2 million people tested at this point of the pandemic is just embarrassing for a country that’s supposed to be the leader of the free world.
That’s not the only reason. When it comes down to total number of COVID-19 tests per 1,000 people, the US falls behind Italy, testing 16.9 people per 1000 compared to Italy’s 29.6 per 1000. Second isn’t half bad really, but I don’t think Trump mentioned being second best.
And it doesn’t end there. If you look at testing coverage per 1000 people, it gets even worse for the US.
Countries report testing data in different ways, with some reporting the number of tests, while other report the number of people tested. The distinction is important. Some countries with a high capacity for testing don’t actually need to ration tests as much.
When testing capacity is low however, tests tend to be reserved or rationed for those that are in the high risk groups. This rationing is one of the reasons that tested people are not exactly representative of the wider population.
So, where testing coverage is higher, the data is generally less biased and more representative or what the real numbers are. That being said, the US currently sits sixth behind Iceland, Estonia, Norway, Italy and Switzerland when it comes to testing coverage per 1000 people.
I could go on but, this really seems like enough for now.
It’s bad enough that Trump took his sweet time to mobilise the country’s response to the pandemic, but the fact that he’s putting down the efforts of other countries who are actually doing a better job than him (lets face it, that’s not hard to do) is just an insult to all the hard work put they’ve put in.
