Trump claims border wall 'stopped Covid' in Arizona – even as state breaks record for coronavirus cases

State reported new records for cases and Covid-19 hospitalisations ahead of president’s border wall visit

Donald Trump said during a visit to Arizona on Tuesday that his southern border wall “stopped Covid” even as the state reported a new record high for confirmed cases of the respiratory disease.

The barrier “stopped Covid, it stopped everything”, he said before heading from a briefing to see a section of the barrier. The state reported 3,591 new cases on Tuesday, a new record, according to AZcentral.com.

The news site also reported the state announced hospitalisations crested the 2,000 mark for the first time on Monday – 2,136 coronavirus patients were using hospital beds on Monday. That was up from 1,992 on Sunday.

Mr Trump’s latest data-ignoring comments about the disease came as he and his top aides and health officials continued to send mixed signals about coronavirus testing.

“Hopefully I have left you with the impression that increased testing is good,” Deborah Birx, a State Department physician who is a senior member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, reportedly told governors on a private call.

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But the president again called Covid-19 testing “a double-edged sword”.

When asked as he left the White House whether he was, as his top spokesperson claimed Monday, just joking during a Saturday night campaign rally that he had ordered his team to slow testing, the president replied: “I don’t kid.”

On Air Force One en route to Yuma, and then Phoenix, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tried to salvage her Monday remark when asked about her boss contradicting it.

“He was noting he was making a serious point, but he was using sarcasm to do that at the rally,” she told reporters. “And the serious point he was making is that when you test more people, you identify more cases.”

That came after Mr Trump again appeared to both complain about testing results and tout his administration having been slow to test but later pass all other countries on numbers of tests conducted.

“By having more cases, it sounds bad. But actually what it is, is we’re finding people, many of those people aren’t sick or very little – maybe young people,” he said. “But what’s happened is because of all of the cases that we find, we have a very low mortality rate, just about the best in the world. So that’s the advantage to the testing, along with other things, but just remember this: The reason we have more cases than other countries is because our testing is so much. Other countries do very little testing.”

“Testing is a double-edged sword,” Mr Trump said. “In one way, it tells you you have cases, in another way you find out where the cases are.”