Donald Trump warns China of dire consequences

US President Donald Trump on Saturday said China should suffer “results” if it were found to possess been “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus outbreak.

“It could be stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and also the whole world is suffering due to it,” Trump said at a meeting.

“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake,” he said. “But if they were deliberately responsible, then surely there should be consequences.”

The US president offered no proof to back his claim. Still, some parts of the media and his collaborators have recently disputed that - with giving any proof - the virus escaped a virology laboratory in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak in China.

There are news reports of the lab getting funding from the US, and American diplomats showing concerns about safety measures in place at the ability. There have also been reports that US intelligence agencies have launched an investigation into the lab.

China has reacted clearly to Trump’s charges. The director of the laboratory in Wuhan has denied claims that it can be the source of the outbreak, calling it “impossible”.

In an interview with state media published on Saturday, Yuan Zhiming, the director of the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that “there’s no way this virus came from us”. None of his staff had been affected from virus, he told state-backed media outlet CGTN, adding that the “whole institute is completing research in several areas associated with the coronavirus”.

The origin of the pandemic has been discovered to a wet market in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 virus is believed to possess been transmitted to humans.

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, displayed a graph at a briefing attended by Trump that showed the death rates of various nations, and China was shown to be at the bottom with the lowest rate.

Birx said she included China within the chart to focus on how “unrealistic” its coronavirus numbers are. The US death rate is 11.24 per 100,000, which is far above China’s reported rate of 0.33.