(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said it’s “a badge to honor” that the U.S. has more than 1.5 million cases of coronavirus, saying the total is a result of the country testing millions of people for infection.
“I view it as a badge of honor,” Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday. “It’s a great tribute to the testing.”
At least 91,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, since February. The U.S. has now performed more than 11.8 million tests for infection by the virus, according to the Covid Tracking Project, after the government experienced delays in getting a test developed and manufactured.
The U.S. has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
“If you’re testing 14 million people, you’re going to find many more cases,” Trump said. “Many of these people aren’t very sick but they still go down as a case, so actually the number of cases -- and we’re also a much bigger country than most. So when we have a lot of cases, I don”t look at that as a bad thing, I look at that as, in a certain respect, as being a good thing because it means our testing is much better.”
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