President Donald Trump held a rambling roundtable Monday afternoon, wrongly declaring that he has already saved millions of lives during the coronavirus pandemic, and insisting that children return to school in the fall.
After being told Los Angeles just announced all fall public school classes will be held online, New York is delaying the start of school, and summer school teachers have died after contracting coronavirus, President Trump interrupted a questioner and dismissively declared, “Yeah, the schools should be opened. Schools should be opened. Kids want to go to school.”
He even claimed, “You’re losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed,” although he did not explain how.
“We did the right thing we saved millions of lives,” Trump added, “we saved millions of lives. Had we not done the initial closure, we would have had two – Mike and I were talking about it – two to three million lives lost. But we did that, so we’re at about 135,000, and we’ll be at, somewhat higher than that by the time it ends.”
“We would have lost two million, three million lives had we not done it,” Trump claimed.
Trump once declared if there were only 60,000 coronavirus deaths he will have done a “good job.” So far about 135,000 people in the U.S have died from the virus.
His claim he blocked people from China from entering the U.S. is false. Tens of thousands poured into the United States because his executive order was weak. In fact, the AP reported it was “more like a sieve.”
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