COVID-19 cases surge in the US: Trump blames mass testing, health experts say it’s due to reopening [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• President Donald Trump said on Friday that the spike of COVID-19 cases across the US was due to expanded testing but health experts said that it was caused by the reopening of the states last month.
• COVID-19 cases are steadily increasing in 21 states based on the data gathered by The New York Times.
• Dr. Irwin Redlener and Dr. Vin Gupta, public health experts and analysts, said that the ongoing protests nationwide can also add to the spikes of new COVID-19 cases.

While data and health experts claimed that the spike of COVID-19 cases in the United States was due to the relaxed restrictions weeks ago, President Donald Trump was insisting that the incident was attributed to mass testing.

“By the way, when you do more testing, you have more cases. We have more cases than anybody because we do more testing than anybody. It’s pretty simple,” Trump said on Friday at the White House Rose Garden.

“Remember this: When you have more tests, you have more cases. I say to my people: Every time we test, you find cases because we do more testing. So if we have more cases — if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you, there’d be more cases,” he added.

According to the data collated by The New York Times, COVID-19 cases are increasing in 21 states. Indication showed that expanded testing has caught more cases, but public health experts claimed that realistically speaking, the lifted home quarantine orders and social distancing measures caused the surges.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said that “the surge numbers are real.”

Redlener, who is a public health analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, said that more testing logically captures more positive tests. Yet, he also emphasized that “to deny the fact that we’re having an ongoing pandemic with continued spread is contrary to all evidence that we have and everything that we know about the behavior of the virus.”

Dr. Vin Gupta, pulmonologist and global health policy export and also an NBC News and MSNBC contributor, said that the bloated cases are tied to resumed socialization.

“The data that I’ve seen from Verizon and even Apple and Google suggest that people are moving a lot in states like California and Arizona and North Carolina, and those happen to be three of the six states where you’re seeing the biggest spike of cases,” he told NBC News.

Gupta and Redlener said the existing data could be undercounted.

“A consistently high positive rate suggests alternately the virus is endemic in the United States — infecting far more people than we know — or there isn’t enough testing,” Gupta said.

Both doctors said that the current mass protests will likely contribute to the spike of coronavirus cases.

Source: AOL.com