US President Donald Trump has questioned the credibility of India, China and Russia's numbers on COVID-19 deaths. Trump was responding to heated debate with Democratic rival Joe Biden, who blamed him for the heavy COVID-19 toll in the United States. The country has so far registered over 200,000 deaths and more than seven million infections.
"We don't know how many people died of Covid-19 in China, Russia, India... because they do not give straight answers, they don't give real numbers," Trump said during the presidential debate with Biden on Wednesday (IST). "They don't exactly give you a straight count," he said. India officially has over 6.1 million coronavirus cases, second only to the US.
Trump said that millions of people could have lost lives without his timely actions. Biden said the president is "a fool on this" and only worried about masks in the interest of protecting his own health and not others.
After Biden talked about how many US families have lost their loved ones due to COVID-19, Trump said it is due to China. Biden also called the president "totally irresponsible" on managing the coronavirus pandemic in the country.
By last week, the US had conducted 100 million COVID-19 tests, which Trump says is by far more than any other country.
"Second seems to be India with 1.5 billion people, and the numbers would be probably at least 50 million more tests by us," he had recently said. The US has conducted more tests than the entire European Union and more than all of Latin America combined, Trump had also said.