Pompeo says China issuing inaccurate information on coronavirus
Coronavirus responses put world powers at odds; Rich Edson reports.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar on Thursday called for the Trump administration to issue a “national lockdown” in response to reports that the United States is now leading the world in confirmed coronavirus cases.
She also suggested that the country lacked a “functioning health care system.”
“Let’s add this to the list of things we shouldn’t be leading the world in,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted.
She wrote that the Trump administration “desperately needed” to act.
The U.S. overtook China and Italy in confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, with more than 82,000 of them, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University researchers. That total comprises more than 14 percent of the world’s coronavirus infections.
New York state alone -- at almost 40,000 cases -- had more infections than every country besides the U.S., China, Italy, Spain and Germany.
Still, some analysts have called China’s reported statistics into question. Foreign affairs analyst Gordon Chang told Fox News: "For China, the truth has always been a casualty."
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Worldwide coronavirus cases surpassed 520,000 Thursday, nearly doubling in a week.
Omar has made a number of controversial statements amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
On Tuesday, she called for freeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees and prisoners being held on bail, as well as for the takeover of private hospitals. She also drew criticism for blasting Ivanka Trump last week when the president’s daughter shared a family-oriented tweet encouraging social isolation amid the outbreak.
And Omar sent letters to House leadership and the acting secretary of Homeland Security seeking a deportation freeze and more federal funding for refugees and migrants amid the pandemic.
Omar, a Somali refugee and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, is serving her first term.
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She faces a 2020 challenge for her House seat from Republican candidate Dalia al-Aqidi, who fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before settling in the U.S. in the 1980s.
Fox News' Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
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