Phil Kerpen, president of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, claimed Wednesday that many of the coronavirus screenings being conducted are "repeat tests" and that negative test results are not reported.
On Fox News Channel's "The Ingraham Angle," Kerpen accused "panic purveyors" of causing chaos in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We have this huge discontinuity in the data around June 10 where you can just see the number of positives and the number of tests take off everywhere in the country," Kerpen said. "And, you know, states were told to do this.
"The panic purveyors that you have to test everyone. 'Mass testing is the greatest.' Then we start seeing these huge numbers of tests, including huge numbers of positives.
"And it's 'Oh, my God, panic. Shut everything down again based on those numbers.' But a lot of the tests are repeat tests."
In early June, widespread testing became more available nationwide, and the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. has skyrocketed from around 2 million to 3.6 million. Wednesday saw the second-highest number of new confirmed U.S. cases, with 71,750 positives.
Just over 1,000 people died from the virus on Wednesday, the highest figure since June 9.
Kerpen said in multiple states, only positive test results are being reported.
"A lot of the tests ... like Florida, lots of other states are reporting positives only, not negatives," he said. "A lot of employment-based testing, they come in, test everyone. The positives have to be reported to the state, the negatives ... they don't report it.
"So the data is a big mess. And it's really unfortunate because we have had a real rise in some places, much more modest than the big peak we saw a couple of months ago. But it's very hard to differentiate that and understand how serious it actually is when you have this sea of bad data that we now have as a result of this hyper-testing."
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