‘Who believes these numbers?’ Trump claims China MUST be hiding its true Covid-19 death toll, because ‘everybody knows it’

By admin On Apr 18, 2020

President Donald Trump has opened up his daily Covid-19 task force press conference by blasting the media for reporting official data that makes the US look bad, instead of pursuing allegations of a Chinese conspiracy.

“When the fake news gets out there and they start talking about the United States is number one… China’s number one by a lot. It’s not even close. They’re way ahead of us in terms of death,” Trump said just minutes into his daily briefing.

China could not have possibly done better than “highly developed healthcare delivery systems of the United Kingdom, in France in Belgium, in Italy, in Spain, with extraordinary doctors and nurses and equipment,” argued White House Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator Deborah Birx, who was trying to back Trump’s statements with a chart of death rates around the world.

“Who believes these numbers?” Trump interrupted, pointing at China and Iran, and arguing that “we saw more [body] bags on television than that.”

China revised its official coronavirus tally on Friday with authorities in Wuhan adding another 1,290 fatalities to the city’s death toll, accounting for the “incorrect reporting, delays and omissions of cases” in the early stages of the outbreak in the virus’ first major epicenter. After the revision, China’s total death toll stands at 4,632.

Also on rt.com China revised its coronavirus tally to ‘leave no case undocumented’, other countries likely to follow – WHO

Meanwhile in the US, the official toll from Covid-19 nears 38,000 fatalities out of some 720,000 confirmed cases. However, the World Health Organization (accused by Trump of colluding with Beijing to mislead the US about Covid-19 threat) noted that other countries will likely have to follow China’s suit and review their figures as well.

Launching yet another harsh attack against China, Trump claimed that the question wasn’t about if Beijing is to blame for unleashing the coronavirus on the world and not stopping it “before it started,” but whether it was deliberate or not.