US: 'If we did this a different way, we would have lost more lives', says Trump

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that his government did many things right to contain the spread of coronavirus otherwise the country could have lost more than 2 million lives. Trump was speaking to reporters in the South Lawn outside White House where he was asked about the IHME model that has predicted more than 1,34,000 deaths in the United States by August, doubling its previous prediction. Trump was asked whether he was worried that states are relaxing guidelines too early, to which he said, no he is not because the model assumes no mitigation.

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"Well, that’s with no mitigation. We’re doing mitigation. We have a lot of mitigation. The fact that they’re out, they’re mitigating. They’re social distancing. They all know that. They’re washing their hands a lot. But we have to get our country open. We have to open our country. So you have all reports, look, models that have been very inaccurate. I’ve seen models that are very inaccurate. But, you know, one model that’s very important is that if we did this a different way, we would have lost more, much more than 2 million people. And we did it the right way. We did everything right. But now it’s time to go back to work," Trump told reporters. 

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When asked about the states that are reopening without following the criteria set by the federal government in terms of having two weeks of reduced cases, Trump said many governors have called him up to get his opinion on the matter and his administration would immediately stop if they see something wrong, hinting that he is for the reopening of the economy given the upcoming presidential election in November this year. "But, you know, the governors are given, like on a story like that, where they’re going down and they’re going down rapidly, but maybe it’s short of the 14 days, they’re given a certain amount of discretion. If I see something wrong though, we will stop it," Trump said.

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Coronavirus outbreak

The United States on April 28 became the first country in the world to record a million confirmed coronavirus cases. The US has recorded more than 1.2 million coronavirus cases so far, of which over 71,000 people have lost their lives. The virus outbreak that started in China's Wuhan city spread across continents in just one month forcing the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare it a pandemic. According to data by worldometer, over 3.69 million people have been infected by the disease globally, of which 2,55,715 have lost their lives to date. 

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(Image Credit: AP)