President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he disagrees with the assessment of the country's top immunologist, Anthony Fauci, on the dire ...
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he disagrees with the assessment of the country's top immunologist, Anthony Fauci, on the dire situation the United States faces as cases of the novel coronavirus continue to spread.
'The current state is really not good,' the highly respected Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a Facebook and Twitter livestream on Monday.
'We are still knee-deep in the first wave of COVID-19 infections,' he said.
Trump, speaking Tuesday in a TV interview, disagreed with Fauci, a key player on the White House's own Coronavirus Task Force.
'I think we are in a good place,' the president said in an interview on the 'Full Court Press' news show hosted by a former Fox News anchor, adding: 'I disagree with him.'
'Dr. Fauci said don't wear masks, now he says wear them,' he continued, adding that the immunologist has 'said numerous things' that according to Trump was bad advice.
'I think we are in a good place,' the president said in an interview on the 'Full Court Press' news show
'He's said numerous things - don't close off China, don't ban China, and I did it anyway. I didn't listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse state,' Trump continued.
'You wouldn't believe. The number of deaths more we would have if we didn't do the ban, and then we banned Europe also when Italy and the various countries were in such trouble.
The United States has fared poorly in its handling of the pandemic, with more than 130,000 people losing their lives, the highest death toll in the world by far. Currently there is a surge of cases in the south and the west after regional officials began to relax restrictions.'So we've done a good job. I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we are going to be in very good shape,' Trump added.
Trump has downplayed the ever-rising number of daily cases, blaming them instead on increased testing.
The US is currently testing some 600,000 people a day, according to the COVID Tracking Project, but even this is deemed insufficient by health experts because of the very high rate of positive cases being found.
Trump's comments come after Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, declared that the current state
On Tuesday federal officials said they would offer free COVID-19 testing to people without symptoms to stem a surge of cases in three southern hotspots.
Fourteen states have now hit record-high numbers of new daily infections since the start of July, with hospitals in two Texas counties hitting capacity over the weekend.
The number of people dying from the virus has remained stable or has declined, though deaths tend to lag behind cases because of the time it takes for someone to get sick enough to die.
Florida has now surpassed Arizona with the steepest and most alarming rise in cases in the US.
In just two weeks, the number of total infections there has doubled from 100,000 to more than 200,000 as of Sunday.
President Donald Trump said of Dr. Fauci: 'I disagree with him'
Arizona and Nevada also hit their respective record-high numbers of hospitalized coronavirus patients on Sunday, as the Mayors of both Austin and Houston, Texas, warned that their hospitals are on the brink of being overwhelmed.
Daily new case records were also set with alarmingly steep increases seen in states where the virus has been relatively quiet until recently: West Virginia, Tennessee and Montana.
Last week, national attention turned to Arizona and Texas, which each surpassed their previous record numbers of new cases in a single day over and over again.
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