By Aaron Miller-
President Donald Trump has put COVID- 19 tests into perspective after claiming a badge of honour when presented with the claim that the U.S has the highest number of cases in the world.
The U.S president said the increasing number of cases is simply evidence the country is testing more people.
“By the way, you know, when you say that we lead in cases, that’s because we have more testing than anybody else,” the president said at the White House. “When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing. I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing, because it means our testing is much better. So, if we were testing a million people instead of 14 million people, it would have far few cases, right?
“So, I view it as a badge of honor. Really, it’s a badge of honor,” Trump said.
Trump is right that international comparisons have to take into account testing for those comparisons to be reliable. The U.S. has performed over 12 million tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project and continues to lead the world in testing. Positive results o Covid-19 become more likely when more people are tested anywhere in the world.
Cases in the U.S are expected to rise after a campaign group noted that protesters in Michigan last Sunday were monitored through their phone devices, revealing that many of them returned to various locations in the country.
The increase in national testing in the U.S has not prevented health experts from raising concerns that not enough is being done for state’s to safely reopen.
Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute told a congressional panel monitoring the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic last week that, “The U.S. needs more than 900,000 tests every day to safely open up again. We are doing about a third of that.”
With more testing on the way, the number of positive Covid-19 results in the U.S will inevitably rise.
Other countries will have to first match the number of testing taking place in the U.S before accurate comparisons can be made about the number .
Donald Trump’s badge of honour claim is meant to be a sarcastic way of telling the world that international comparisons must be based on the fundamental existence of equal levels of testing before they are well based.
Trump is known for lack of tact in his fights with media, but this is one of the occasions when he is absolutely right that it will be wrong to unfavourably compare the number of Covid-19 tests in the U.S.