Trump says Spain ‘having hard time’ with COVID-19 and US coped ‘much better’ with virus than EU

DONALD Trump has said Spain is ‘having a hard time’ with COVID-19 while claiming the US has dealt with it ‘much better than the EU’.

The president told a White House press briefing on Thursday that he is confident his country has ‘surpassed the peak’ of infections, despite having recorded the most cases and deaths in the world.

“In the past five weeks, per capita cases doubled in France; surged to over 300 percent in Spain, which I’ve been hearing about and speaking to some of the leaders of Spain, and they are having a hard time; and increased more than 400 percent in Italy again,” he said.

“And as you remember, I stopped — I put a ban on people coming in from Europe after the ban I imposed on China, Wuhan — but because of Wuhan primarily, because that area was very infected. 

“We — we also put a ban on Europe.  So Spain is being heavily impacted, France, and 400 percent in Italy.

“Yesterday, European nations experienced 50 percent more deaths than the United States.  And you don’t hear these things.  You don’t hear these statistics.  But the United States has done really well.  Very proud of everybody that worked on this.  And I really do believe we’re rounding the corner.”

The US currently has more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and 190,000 deaths.

“We have done much, much better than the European Union,” Trump claimed.

“They have a huge peak there, while we are confident that we have already passed our peak, we’ll see, but we are doing very well throughout the country.”

The average number of COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants in the US in the last seven days is 2.15, compared to Spain’s 1.33 and France’s 0.23, according to data from the University of Oxford.

The White House has not confirmed who the leaders of Spain Trump has allegedly spoken to are, after being asked by Efe.

In Spain, 554,143 people have been infected with COVID-19 and 29,699 have died since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest data from the Spanish Ministry of Health.