US President Donald Trump on Saturday (local time) said was encouraging coronavirus response workers to slow down testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered.
"Look, everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldn't make any more of a big deal out of it," Trump said during his first Presidential campaign rally amid the coronavirus pandemic at Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He took to the stage to deliver his re-election campaign speech without wearing a face mask and thousands who attended the rally followed suit.
"When you do testing to that extent, you are gonna find more people, you're gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down please. They test and they test. We have tests that people don't know what's going on," he said while taking the credit of shutting down the United States to "all people from China" and later, "closed it down to Europe."
According to Trump, 25 million people have been tested for COVID-19 in the US, which is why the total number of confirmed cases in the country is high.
During the rally he also called for reopening of schools as "Kids are much stronger than us."
As per the Johns Hopkins University's latest data, a total number of 2,254,662 people have been infected with the coronavirus in US and 119,719 people have succumbed to the disease so far.
( With inputs from ANI )