US President Donald Trump, during the first presidential debate on Tuesday, 29 September, ahead of the US elections, said countries such as India, China and Russia don't give a "straight count" of COVID-19-related deaths.
Debating the handling of the coronavirus outbreak with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Trump said, "If we would have listened to you (Biden), the country would have been left wide open. Millions of people would have died, not 200,000. And one person is too much. It's China's fault, it should have never happened... When you talk about numbers, you don't know how many people died in China. You don't know how many people died in Russia. You don't know how many people died in India. They don't exactly give you a straight count. Just so you understand..."
(Watch the first US Presidential Debate here.)
He further went on to laud his administration's handling of the outbreak, saying, "In fact, people that would not be necessarily on my side said that President Trump did a phenomenal job (on handling of the coronavirus pandemic)... We're weeks away from a vaccine... You (Biden) could have never done the job that we did. You don't have it in your blood."
Earlier in the debate, Biden had reportedly said that the 200,000 people who died of the coronavirus in the US were 20 percent of the global death toll of 1 million, while the US population is only 4 percent of the world.
In his news conferences in the past, Trump has mentioned India's record of conducting COVID-19 tests as the second-best in the world and only behind the US.
(With inputs from IANS.)
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