‘Mistake is a mistake’: Trump warns China of ‘consequences’ for Covid-19 outbreak

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President Donald Trump on Saturday said China should face “consequences” if it was found to have been “knowingly responsible” for the novel coronavirus outbreak.

“It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it,” Trump said at the daily briefing by the White House task force on coronavirus.

“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake,” he added. “But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences.”

President Trump began pointing to China as the origin of the pandemic first by identifying the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”, which fuelled anti-Asian sentiments already coursing through the country. Other US officials chose to call it the “Wuhan virus”, after the city where the epidemic is believed to have started.

Some US officials and Republican lawmakers attacked China alleging it was concealing the true magnitude of it outbreak; they cited intelligence reports .

As the American president came under mounting criticism for his administration’s delayed and botched response to the epidemic, he went after the World Health Organization, accusing it of helping China conceal the magnitude or its outbreak and mismanaging its own response to the crisis.

China has since revised its numbers upwards, by 50% in Wuhan.

The coronavirus pandemic had killed 159,510 people around the world till Saturday evening and infected 2,317,759. The United States has been the worst hit 38,664 fatalities and 732197 reported cases; going up by 3,847 and 31,905 over the past 24 hours respectively.

President Trump has previously said China numbers are “larger” than America’s and that it has the “most” in the world. But he has presented no evidence to back that claim.

“Does anybody really believe this number?” Trump said Saturday, referring to China’s reported mortality rate of 0.33 per 100,000 people, on a chart presented at the briefing by Deborah birx, coordinator of the task force.

Birx said that she had included China on the chart to show how “unrealistic”those numbers are. The US mortality rate is 11.24 per 100,000, in comparison, which is much higher in comparison to China’s reported numbers, but much lower than some of the other countries such as Belgium, which led the world with 45.2 fatalities per 100,000, followed by Spain with 42.81, and Italy with 37.64.