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World Roundup: Trump warns: China could face consequences over outbreak

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President Donald Trump of the United States has warned that China could face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.”

“It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t,” Trump, replying to reporters’ questions, told reporters at a White House briefing Saturday (Sunday in Manila). “And now the whole world is suffering because of it.”

The Trump administration has said it doesn’t rule out that the novel coronavirus was spread—accidentally—from a laboratory researching bats in Wuhan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian—who previously alleged that the US military might have brought the virus into China—has rejected US media reports on the subject and said there is “no scientific basis.”

Trump also cast doubt on official Chinese figures showing the country has suffered just 0.33 deaths per 100,000 people.

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“The number’s impossible,” he said. “It’s an impossible number to hit.”

The United States, according to a chart displayed at the briefing, has had 11.24 deaths per 100,000 people while France has had 27.92 and Spain 42.81.

Wuhan lab rejects claims

At the same time, the director of a maximum-security laboratory in China’s coronavirus ground-zero city of Wuhan has rejected claims that it could be the source of the outbreak, calling it “impossible.”

Beijing has come under increasing pressure over transparency in its handling of the pandemic, with the US probing whether the virus actually originated in a virology institute with a high-security biosafety laboratory.

Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in a market that sold wildlife.

But the existence of the facility has fueled conspiracy theories that the germ spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically its P4 laboratory which is equipped to handle dangerous viruses.

Trump was asked whether China should suffer consequences over the pandemic which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December and has left more than 157,000 people dead around the world.

“If they were knowingly responsible, certainly,” he said. “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. 

“But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences,” Trump said.

“Was it a mistake that got out of control or was it done deliberately?” he asked. “That’s a big difference between those two.

“In either event they should have let us go in,” he said. “We asked to go in early. And they didn’t want us in. I think they knew it was something bad and they were embarrassed.”

“They said they’re doing an investigation,” the president continued. “So let’s see what happens with their investigation. But we’re doing investigations also.”

Lab director insists

In an interview with state media published Saturday Yuan Zhiming, director of the laboratory, said that “there’s no way this virus came from us.”

None of his staff had been infected, he told the English-language state broadcaster CGTN, adding the “whole institute is carrying out research in different areas related to the coronavirus.”

The institute had already dismissed the theory in February, saying it had shared information about the pathogen with the World Health Organization in early January.

But this week the United States has brought the rumors into the mainstream, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying US officials are doing a “full investigation” into how the virus “got out into the world.”

When asked if the research suggested the virus could have come from the institute, Yuan said: “I know it’s impossible.”

“As people who carry out viral studies we clearly know what kind of research is going on at the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples,” he said.

He said that because the P4 laboratory is in Wuhan “people can’t help but make associations,” but that some media outlets are “deliberately trying to mislead people.”

Reports in the Washington Post and Fox News have both quoted anonymous sources who voiced concern that the virus may have come—accidentally—from the facility.

Yuan said the reports were “entirely based on speculation” without “evidence or knowledge.”

Independent probe

Australia on Sunday called for an independent investigation into the global response to the coronavirus pandemic, including the World Health Organization’s handling of the crisis.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne said the country would “insist” on a review that would probe, in part, China’s early response to the outbreak in Wuhan, the city where COVID-19 emerged late last year.

“We need to know the sorts of details that an independent review would identify for us about the genesis of the virus, about the approaches to dealing with it [and] addressing the openness with which information was shared,” she told public broadcaster ABC.

Payne said Australia shared similar concerns to the United States, whose President Donald Trump has accused the WHO of “mismanaging” the crisis and covering up the seriousness of China’s outbreak before it spread.

Trump has also announced that Washington will halt payments to the UN body that amounted to $400 million last year.

“I’m not sure that you can have the health organization which has been responsible for disseminating much of the international communications material, and doing much of the early engagement and investigative work, also as the review mechanism,” Payne said.

“That strikes me as a bit poacher-and-gamekeeper.”

Global death toll

More than 160,000 people have died from the new coronavirus around the world, almost two thirds of them in Europe, according to an AFP tally at 0940 GMT Sunday (5.40 p.m. Sunday in Manila) based on official sources.

A total of 160,502 fatalities have been registered out of 2,331,318 cases. These include 101,398 deaths and 1,151,820 infections in Europe, the continent hardest hit by the virus.

The United States is the country with the most reported deaths at 39,090, followed by Italy with 23,227, Spain 20,453, France 19,323 and Britain 15,464.

Football season rebooted

Turkmenistan is rebooting its football season on Sunday, with fans flocking back to stadiums in one of the few countries yet to declare a case of coronavirus.

The reclusive Central Asian state followed other countries around the world when it suspended its eight-team league in March just three games into the season.

The national football federation cited recommendations by the health ministry and the World Health Organization for preventing the spread of the illness.

A month later, and despite international concerns that Turkmen authorities are underplaying the threat of the virus, football is returning, with supporters only too happy to follow the action from the stands.

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