Trump was ‘joking’ about slowing down testing – White House

At his first campaign rally for months on Saturday, President Donald Trump told his supporters it was the “double-edged sword” of comprehensive testing that had led to the US having the world’s highest number of coronavirus cases.

“When you do testing… you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” he told attendees in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “So I said to my people: ‘Slow the testing down.’”

The White House later said his comments were meant as a joke.

But he revisited the issue on Monday with a new tweet in which he argued that the more tests a country carried out, the more cases it was likely to find. However, some health experts have said this is not the case.

The US has nearly 2.3m reported cases of the virus and the highest number of deaths worldwide with nearly 120,000.

Source: BBC