China failed to disclose coronavirus outbreak in timely manner: Pompeo
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States strongly believes that China has failed to report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely manner to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“We strongly believe that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization,” Pompeo said during a news conference in Washington on Wednesday.
“China didn't share all of the information it had. Instead, it covered up how dangerous the disease is” he added.
Pompeo also accused China of failing to report human-to-human transmission of the virus.
“It didn't report sustained human-to-human transmission for a month until it was in every province inside of China. It censored those who tried to warn the world in order to halt the testing of new samples, and it destroyed existing samples."
In recent days, the US officials have repeatedly criticized China over handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which began late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Last week, US President Donald Trump halted funding to the WHO, accusing the international body of siding with China and reliance on Chinese data.
“Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” Trump said in a news briefing in Washington last Tuesday.
The White House has been seeking to deflect criticism of its own sluggish response to the coronavirus crisis by putting too much emphasis on the virus’s origins in China, with Trump and other US officials, including Pompeo, referring to the virus as the “Chinese virus.”
The US has by far the world's largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases at over 810,000, almost four times as many as Spain, the country with the second-highest number.
US coronavirus deaths also topped 46,000 on Wednesday after rising by a near-record single-day number on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally.
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