Anthony Fauci rejects Trump's assertion of 'exaggerated' COVID data in US

Anthony Fauci, Director of USA's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Sunday rejected current US President Donald Trump's claim that data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in US was overblown.

"The deaths are real deaths," Anthony Fauci told ABC News. He added that jam-packed hospitals and stressed-out healthcare workers are "not fake. That's real".

On Sunday,Trump fired off a tweet making the allegations about inflated numbers and blamed Centre for Disease Control and Prevention for using "ridiculous method" to collate and calculate numbers.

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"The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov ’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. “When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!" tweeted Trump.

Anthony Fauci along with US Surgeon General Jerome Adams defended accuracy of data published by CDC. Adams appeared on CNN's State of the Union.

“From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those numbers and I think people need to be very aware that it’s not just about the deaths,” Adams said. “It’s about the hospitalizations, the capacity.”

Fauci and Adams expressed optimism that the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus is accelerating after a slow start. More than 4.2 million people have been inoculated since Dec. 14 with one of two vaccines, far short of the Trump administration’s goal of 20 million by the end of 2020.

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“We wanted to get to 20 million, but some glimmer of hope is that in the last 72 hours, they’ve gotten 1.2 million doses into peoples’ arms, which is an average of about 500,000 a day,” Fauci said. “We are not where we want to be. There’s no doubt about that. But I think we can get there.”

Trump, a Republican who leaves office on Jan. 20 after losing a bid for a second term to Democrat Joe Biden, has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic. He has also scorned and ignored federal recommendations for containing the spread.

More than 20 million people have been infected in the United States and nearly 347,000 have died – or one out of every 950 U.S. residents - since the virus first emerged in China in late 2019, according to the CDC.

(With Reuters inputs)