Washington: In an interview, US President Donald Trump claimed that America was "lower than the world" regarding coronavirus data, before suggesting South Korea's figures were so low because they were faking their statistics.
In the interview with AXIOS news on Monday, the President handed the reporter a series of charts and graphs to illustrate that the US was "lower than the world" for COVID-19, the Daily Mail reported.
The interviewer clarifies he was asking about death as a proportion of population, not death as a proportion of cases.
"That's where the US is really bad," the reporter said of the death as population propotion cases.
"Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc."
Trump responds: "You can't do that."
"You have to go by where - look, here is the US," Trump says, holding out of his charts. "You have to go by the cases."
The interviewer then points to South Korea, which he says has a population of 51 million, but only 300 coronavirus deaths.
"You don't know that," Trump said, adding: "I won't get into that because we have a very good relationship with the country. But you don't know that. And they have spikes."
When the conversation moves to testing in the US, the President said: "Don't we get credit for that?... Death is way down from where it was... Where it was is much higher than where it is right now."
Trump also said that COVID-19 number were going down in Texas and Arizona, two states which have experienced a sudden, exponential resurgence in coronavirus cases, the Daily Mail reported.
It was not immediately clear what day Trump's latest reports were referring to.
As of Tuesday, the US accounts for the world's highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths at 4,717,716 and 155,471, respectively, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
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