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Tobi Akingbade
Aug 04, 2020
Donald Trump managed to get extremely confused during an interview as he declared that the US was “lower than the world” regarding coronavirus data.
He also bizarrely suggested that South Korea's figures were so low because they are faking their statistics. It was all so absurd that people could not help but wonder if the HBO interview was actually a very clever parody.
In a face to face interview with Axios's Jonathan Swan on Monday, POTUS dashed the journalist a series illustrations on a piece of paper that he claimed showed that America is “lower than the world” for Covid-19.
Viewers at home were baffled and a very confused Swan was forced to clarify he was asking about death as a proportion of the population, not death as a proportion of cases.
“That’s where the US is really bad,” the Swan said of the death as population proportion cases. “Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”
Trump interjected by adding: “You can’t do that.”
After a quick back and forth Trump, waving around the elementary charts and graphs in his hands said: “You have to go by the cases.”
Swan said: “Why not as a proportion of the population?”
The president said:
“What it says is that when you have someone where there's a case, the people that live from those cases."
Swan pointed out that it would be “surely relevant” to think about the statistics involving the number of deaths compared to a country's population, but Trump insists that “You have to go by the cases.”
The entire interview has seriously left people questioning whether the whole interview was an elaborate joke with an actor posing as Trump:
We are sad to confirm that this was indeed real life. Sorry about that.
It went on for some time before it appeared like Trump suggested that South Korea has been “faking” their statistics. When asked to clarify, Trump refused.
Trump said:
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.
Their chat then shifted so they could talk about the fact America currently does more testing than other countries, which Trump blamed as the reason behind the US reporting many coronavirus cases.
Trump asked:
Don't we get credit for that?
Later adding, “Death is way down from where it was” and claims that "Where it was is much higher than where it is right now.”
Swan interrupted to add “it went down then it went up again.”
Remaining very adamant Trump added:
But now it's going down again. It's going down in Arizona. It's going down in Florida. It's going down in Texas.
In disbelief, Swan said: “It's going down in Florida?”
Just to put out there, Florida has been among the states to have experienced a shocking and sudden spike in coronavirus cases after the state reopened. But according to Trump, this isn’t the case:
Yeah it levelled out and it's going down, that's my report as of yesterday.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that on Monday Florida saw the lowest number of daily infections reported since mid-June and about half the average number of new positive infections reported daily from the prior week.