Alex Brandon/AP

President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that he knows "for a fact" that the United States doesn’t actually have the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world, saying it's simply testing more than any other country -- a comment the coordinator of his White House coronavirus task force later clarified.

"I think the reporting here has been pretty straight-forward for the past five – six weeks," Dr. Deborah Birx told reporters. "Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown.”

Earlier in the press conference, Trump said that "America continues to perform more tests than any other nation in the world, and I think that’s probably why we have more cases."

"Because you look at some these very large countries," he continued, "I know for a fact that they have far more cases than we do, but they don’t report them."

Per capita, countries like Italy and South Korea have done more testing than the United States by far. Many experts believe that the number of coronavirus cases in the US is likely higher than reported due to problems with testing availability.

Birx elaborated there may have been early deaths in the US that were not counted as coronavirus related, but perhaps should have been.

Birx said some countries don’t consider coronavirus to be the cause of death in some individuals with pre-existing conditions.

“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a Covid-19 death.”

“The intent is right now,” she said, “if someone dies with Covid-19, we are counting that as a Covid-19 death.”

She later conceded that some rural areas might not “have the same level of testing.”