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United States President Donald Trump said he has seen evidence that the new coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory as it threatened tariffs in Beijing for its role in the global pandemic.
However, his claim was immediately undermined by his intelligence chief and his top diplomat, who said: “We don’t know precisely where it started.”
Trump is making handling the outbreak in Beijing a major issue for his re-election campaign in November.
When asked about reports that he could cancel the United States’ debt obligations to China, Trump said he could “do it differently” and act in a “more direct” way.
“I could do the same thing, but even for more money, simply by imposing tariffs,” he said.
“We signed a trade agreement where they are supposed to buy, and they have actually been buying a lot. But that now becomes secondary to what happened with the virus,” Trump told reporters. “The virus situation is simply not acceptable.”
Trump’s latest rhetoric against China came when new figures show that more than 2,000 people died from coronavirus deaths in a 24-hour period for the third consecutive day, according to the latest count reported by Johns Hopkins University.
The country, the most affected by the pandemic in terms of the number of deaths, registered 2,053 deaths yesterday, after 2,502 deaths on Wednesday and 2,207 on Tuesday.
At least 62,906 people have died in the United States, according to the Baltimore-based university.
New figures also showed that 30 million Americans have lost their jobs during the shutdown.
Sadness in the world’s largest economy found its parallel across the Atlantic, where experts warned of an unprecedented financial catastrophe in Europe.
Scientists believe the new coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, emerging in China late last year, possibly from a market selling exotic animals for meat.
But speculation has grown about a top-secret lab, bolstered by internet rumors and right-wing radio broadcasters, and increasingly taken over by the President of the United States.
The latest coronavirus stories
When asked if he had seen anything that gave him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, Trump replied, “Yes, I have.”
He declined to give details.
“I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he added.
However, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated that he had not seen definitive evidence.
“We don’t know exactly where it started,” he said.
“We don’t know if it came from the Wuhan Virology Institute. We don’t know if it came from the wet market or elsewhere. We don’t know those answers.”
Trump also said that China may not be able to stop the spread of the coronavirus or let it spread. He declined to say whether he blamed Chinese President Xi Jinping for what he feels is misinformation about the emergence of the coronavirus.
Trump said of China’s efforts to get to the bottom of how the virus emerged: “At least they seem to be trying to be somewhat transparent with us.”
“But let’s find out. You will learn in the not too distant future. But it is a terrible thing what happened, whether they made a mistake or if it started as a mistake and then made another one. Or did someone do something on purpose?” said.
The Office of the US Director of National Intelligence said analysts “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine” the source of the outbreak.
Beijing has denied that the laboratory was the source of the virus.
Last month, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said: “Officials (of the World Health Organization) have repeatedly stated that there is no unique evidence that the new coronavirus was produced in a laboratory. .
“Many world-renowned medical experts also believe that the so-called laboratory leak hypothesis has no scientific basis.”
Restrictions were reduced in half of the US states. USA
The latest unemployment claims from an additional 3.84 million Americans mean that approximately 9% of the United States population has applied for unemployment benefits in the past six weeks.
The economic costs of blockades imposed to try to limit the spread of the disease have turned into frustration.
In Michigan, protesters, some of them armed, broke into the state capitol building, demanding the removal of restrictions, which they say hurt the economy and represent a government overreach.
As the White House economic reopening orientation expired yesterday after two weeks, half of all US states. USA They continued to relax restrictions on restaurants, retail stores, and other businesses.
Weeks after insisting that he had “full” authority to decide when and how to reopen the nation’s economy, Trump largely let each governor decide state by state.
Although the White House declined to extend its April 16 reopening guide, which recommended a phased economic restart only after strict safeguards are in place, medical experts said those conditions remained unsatisfied and that acting prematurely risked a resurgence of the outbreak.
They insisted that the safe lifting of social distancing rules will require widespread virus detection and the means to trace the close social contacts of infected people so that they, too, can be tested and isolated.
“You can’t jump into a situation where you’re really tempting (the virus) to recover. That’s what worries me,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. NBC
Bodies found in non-refrigerated trucks in New York
New York City handed over a refrigerated truck to a funeral home on Wednesday after it was discovered it was storing bodies in non-refrigerated U-Haul vehicles, a Reuters witness said.
The eyewitness saw bodies in a U-Haul pickup truck and said two pickup trucks and a truck were parked outside the funeral home.
ABC News reported that about 100 bodies were stored in the vehicles after funeral home owner Andrew T Cleckley Funeral Services said the freezer that normally stores the bodies stopped working.
It was unclear how long the bodies had been stored in the U-Hauls or if any had been the victim of Covid-19.
The bodies were found after neighbors reported an odor from the trucks, New York media reported.
New York City has been at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, and city funeral homes have been overwhelmed.
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