Donald Trump now claims someone else made Covid-19 testing promise he made yesterday
'Somebody started throwing around 5 million. I didn't say 5 million. Somebody said 5 million,' Trump said Wednesday while speaking with reporters.
Donald Trump is now claiming someone else said the US would soon be conducting 5 million coronavirus tests per day – a bold reversal that comes less than hours after he made the claim himself.
‘Somebody started throwing around 5 million. I didn’t say 5 million. Somebody said 5 million,’ Trump said Wednesday while speaking with reporters.
‘We will be there. But I didn’t say it.’
However, on Wednesday Trump said that the country would be testing 5 million a day ‘very soon’ while making remarks about the country’s small businesses.
The president made the prediction after a reporter asked him if he thought the US could hit 5 million tests per day, which a Harvard panel of experts said would be necessary to open the country by early June. The panel also said 20 million tests a day would be needed by mid-July to avoid future shutdowns.
‘‘Oh, we’re going to be there very soon. If you look at the numbers, it could be that we’re getting very close,’ he said.
‘I mean, I don’t have the exact numbers. We would have had them if you asked me the same question a while ago because people with the statistics were there. We’re going to be there very soon.’
Trumps conflicting statements on the potential of US coronavirus testing comes after he unveiled a plan to increase testing on Monday. The plan includes sending all 50 states enough testing supplies to screen 2% of their populations each month, which would reportedly lead to as many as 2 million tests a week.
So far, the US has tested approximately 5.8 million in total for coronavirus and has been averaging 200,000 tests across the country per day. The most tests conducted in one day was 314,182 according to the COVID Traacking
Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services has since come out to say that testing 5 million Americans a day is ‘an unreasonable benchmark.’
‘There is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests per day,’ Giroir told Time.