Many Names for COVID, Kung Flu One of Them: US Prez Trump at Rally

While addressing a rally, Trump said that the disease has more names than any other disease in the history.

File image of US President Donald Trump.

(Photo: AP)

US President Donald Trump, while addressing a rally on Saturday, 20 June, said that the novel coronavirus has several names and “Kung Flu”, a pun on the Chinese martial art, is one of them, Bloomberg reported.

While addressing a rally in Oklahoma, he said that the disease has more names than any other disease in history.

“I can name – Kung flu. I can name 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu. What difference. I think we have 19 or 20 versions of the name,” he said.

‘Did a Phenomenal Job’: Trump on Handling COVID

Regarding the handling of coronavirus outbreak in US, he said that he had done “a phenomenal job” and “saved hundreds of thousands of lives by limiting travel from China and Europe as the pandemic spread overseas,” Bloomberg reported.

As per the Johns Hopkins tracker, over 22 lakh have contracted the virus and over one lakh deaths have been reported in the US.

According to Associated Press, he said that increased coronavirus testing “was making his record look bad — and suggested the testing effort should slow down.”

“Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test,” he said.

‘Helpless Puppet of Left’: Trump on Biden

The Saturday rally in Tulsa in Oklahoma, a state dominated by his Republican party, was his first public meeting since 2 March when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted his campaign.

In his speech of about of 100 minutes, Trump called his Democratic Party rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, a "helpless puppet of the left" but underlining his attacks on him as a person of diminished capacities manipulated by others said that he was himself far from being a radical but was used by the left, IANS reported.

“I don’t think he knows what he is any more. But he’s controlled by the radical left.”

US President Donald Trump

To appeal to voters in the middle, he targeted the continuing protests around the country sparked by the extra-judicial killing of an African-American man by police in Minneapolis that have led to calls for abolishing the police and for rewriting the nation''s history and removing statues and memorials to the nation''s founding fathers and national heroes who owned slaves.

Trump boasted about the economic progress made till the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and spoke of the stock markets'' rebound since then, although the unemployment is high.

(With inputs from Bloomberg, IANS and Associated Press)