US President Donald Trump has said he is “upset”with China over its late sharing of information on coronavirus.
“They should have told us about this,” Trump toldreporters at a press conference in the White House on Sunday.
“I’m a little upset with China. I’ll be honest withyou, because as much as I like (Chinese) President Xi (Jinping) and as much asI respect and admire the country,” he said.
Trump said soon after he received information about thespread of the deadly viral infection in China, he wanted to send US medicalteam there. However, China did not allow.
Without specifying any timeline, Trump said he had spoken toPresident Xi “specifically” about sending US team to China, however,”he doesn’t want this… this is not something that he wants”.
The US president said it is “out of pride” that Chinadidn’t “want us to send people” and “they didn’t reallyrespond”.
Reiterating that America’s relationship with China is”very good”, Trump said, “I wish they (had) told us three monthssooner that this was a problem. We didn’t know about it. They knew about it andthey should (have) told us. We could have saved a lot of lives throughout theworld.”
Meanwhile, the US and Chinese officials continued with theirwar of words over coronavirus on Twitter.
“Since early January, the CCP has retaliated againstits citizens and journalists in China for making information public, launcheddisinformation campaigns around the world, and limited the internationalcommunity’s access to valuable public health information,” the NationalSecurity Council of the White House tweeted.
On March 20, Morgan Ortagus, spokesperson of the US StateDepartment, tweeted, “By Jan. 3, Chinese authorities had already ordered#COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored publicconcerns online. @SpokespersonCHN is right: This is a timeline the world mustabsolutely scrutinize.”
Responding to the tweet, Hua Chunying, spokesperson of theChinese Foreign Ministry, said China has been updating the US on coronavirusand its response since January 3. On January 15, the US State Departmentnotified Americans in China about the US Centre for Disease Control’s warningagainst the coronavirus.
“And now blame China for Delay? Seriously,” shesaid.
China, Hua tweeted, has treated COVID 19 as highlypathogenic virus according to the law on prevention and treatment of infectiousdiseases.
“As WHO stated, China identified the pathogen in arecord short time and shared genetic sequence with the world, which helpedothers with epidemic response,” she said.
However, Ortagus denied her remarks.
“Nonsense. You call it ‘highly pathogenic’ now, butlast month your officials blocked a WHO report from calling COVID19 a’dangerous pathogen’,” she said, tagging a link of a ‘Financial Times’article on the topic to buttress her argument.