Health

Donald Trump says India does not give ‘straight count’ on COVID deaths

As India continues to witness a massive surge in novel Coronavirus cases, the United States President Donald Trump has said that India does not give a “straight count” on the COVID deaths.

On Tuesday night, during a presidential debate between Trump and Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden, they both sparred on the extent of the deaths caused by the pandemic.

Biden said that the 200,000 people who died of the coronavirus were 20 per cent of the global death toll of 1 million while the US population is only 4 per cent of the world, a report by news agency IANS said.

“When you talk about numbers you know how many people died in China? You know how many people died in Russia? You don’t know how many people died in India. They don’t give you a straight count,” Trump to Biden during the debate.

According to the report, Trump said that the pandemic was China’s fault, but Biden tried to deflect China’s role wanting to pin the blame for its ravages on Trump.

The first debate was held in Cleveland was about domestic issues and there were no international questions on the agenda set out Chris Wallace of Fox News, who was the moderator for the debate. The mention of India and the two other countries brought a passing reference to foreign countries.

The US president earlier claimed that India’s record of conducting COVID tests as the second-best in the world and only behind the US.

Meanwhile, India reported 80,472 new COVID cases in the last 24 hours, thus taking the total number of infections to 62,25,764.

Of the total, 97,497 people have succumbed to the virus, 9,40,441 are active cases, while as many as 51,87,826 people have been treated and discharged so far.

On Tuesday, daily coronavirus cases in India dropped below 75,000 and less than 1,000 deaths were reported in a day after nearly a month. India’s recovery rate is 83.01 per cent, the highest in the world. The fatality rate, on the other hand, is 1.57 per cent.

Meanwhile, the global death toll due to COVID passed the one million mark on Tuesday, most of which have been reported in the United States, followed by Brazil and India. These three countries account for nearly 45 per cent of COVID deaths globally.

According to an international news agency Reuters, over 5,400 people die from the disease every 24 hours. This results in around 226 people succumbing to disease per hour, or one person every 16 seconds.

 

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