Coronavirus: US piles pressure on China to come clean on origin of COVID-19
- As of Friday, April 17, the US was the most hit country in the world with over 678,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 36,000 deaths
- President Trump said his government was doing everything possible to determine whether the novel coronavirus was inadvertently introduced to a human carrier from a lab
- US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Trump's sentiments saying the outbreak occurred near Wuhan Institute of Virology
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The United States of America (US) has piled pressure on China to come clean on the origin of the new strain of coronavirus that has infected over 2 million people and killed more than 146,000 others globally.
US president, Donald Trump, said his administration was investigating the source of the killer virus, including the possibility it was released into the broader environment from a research laboratory in Wuhan.
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Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, April 15, Trump said his government was doing everything possible to determine whether COVID-19 was inadvertently introduced to a human carrier.
"We are doing a very thorough examination of how this horrible situation happened," he said.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the country's top diplomat, echoed Trump's sentiments saying the outbreak occurred near the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"We know this virus originated in Wuhan, China, the Institute of Virology was only a handful of miles from the market, where people first came down with the disease.
We really need the Chinese government to open up and help explain exactly how this virus spread. The Chinese government needs to come clean," he told Fox News.
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As of Friday, April 17, the US was the most hit country in the world with over 678,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 36,000 deaths.
Italy was second in the number of fatalities with 22,170, followed by Spain (19,315), France (17,920), and the UK (13,729).
Some scientists had dismissed claims the deadly pandemic was created in a lab as bio-weapon to reduce the earth's population.
"Our analysis clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," Kristian Andersen, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, and his colleagues wrote in a journal published on Live Science.
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Source: YEN.com.gh
