(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said the coronavirus pandemic is “going away,” as the U.S. continues to see tens of thousands of new daily cases and recorded 1,380 deaths on Tuesday.
“This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” Trump said Wednesday morning in a telephone interview with Fox News. He said the U.S. is in “very good shape” while touting economic indicators.
Trump also reiterated his push for schools to reopen, saying inaccurately that children are “almost immune” to the virus but that “the teachers are a different story.” He recommended that older teachers not return to work until the pandemic passes.
“This is a terrible thing that China sent us,” Trump said.
In June, at least 260 campers and staffers at a sleepaway camp in Georgia tested positive for the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the incident showed Covid-19 “spread efficiently in a youth-centric overnight setting,” a finding that could have implications for school reopenings. The CDC said the camp followed some, but not all, of its mitigation recommendations.
Trump has regularly flipped back and forth between taking the virus seriously in his public remarks and predicting it will disappear. Trump has also touted the potential for a vaccine, and reiterated Wednesday that he believes one will be available by the end of the year.
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