"Kids are much stronger than us," Trump told his supporters at the Saturday campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, adding "Let’s open the schools, please. We gotta get them open, in the fall we gotta get them open."
According to Trump, 25 million people have been tested for COVID-19 in the US, which is why the total number of confirmed cases in the country is high.
"So I said to my people slow the testing down please," Trump said, dismissing a lot of the registered COVID-19 cases, particularly among children, as "sniffles."
Last month, Trump called for reopening schools across the country with possible quarantine extensions for elderly teachers. The US president did say, however, that he considered reopening schools a prerogative of state governors.
Trump also voiced displeasure with senior health official Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who expressed reservations in May over lifting coronavirus-induced restrictions too soon, warning that premature reopening could cause new outbreaks. Fauci also pointed out that children are not completely immune to COVID-19.
The United States has the highest number of COVID-19 cases registered, out of all the countries in the world (more than 2.2 million) and the highest coronavirus death toll (over 119,500 COVID-19 fatalities), according to data from the Johns Hopkins University.
