Donald Trump questions accuracy of South Korean coronavirus stats
Donald Trump has questioned the validity of South Korea’s coronavirus statistics during a heated clash with a US TV station.
The President was questioned by Axios on why the US had such high rates of Covid-19 deaths, which are currently at around 1,000 per day, and why they were rising.
The interviewer said this was compared to South Korea, who has had just 301 deaths from a population of 51m.
The US, meanwhile, has recorded 158,000 deaths.
When told about South Korea’s number of deaths, Trump said: “You don’t know that, you don’t know that.”
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When asked if he thought South Korea had lied about its statistics, Trump said: “I won’t get into that, because I have a very good relationship with the country, but you don’t know that.”
The interview also became heated when Trump was pushed on America’s coronavirus death statistics.
At one point, the President said that “we’re lower than the world, lower than Europe” when talking about Covid-19 death rates.
When the interviewer pointed out that Trump was looking at statistics that compared deaths with number of coronavirus cases and not overall population, the President said this did not matter.
He also denied that cases and deaths were rising in the US, despite official figures suggesting otherwise.
“You can’t do that, you have to go by…look there is the US, you have to go by the cases, the cases of death,” he said.
“When you have somebody, where there’s a case the people that live from those cases.”