Trump admits hiding information about coronavirus

US President Donald Trump said that he knew from the beginning how bad it was, as evidenced by the first numbers coming out of China. Besides issuing a travel ban for China and subsequently Europe, he wanted "to give people the feeling that they all have a chance".

"I don't want to be a negative person. It'd be so much easier for me to come up and say, we have bad news. We are going to lose 220,000 people, and it's going to happen over the next few weeks," Trump said.

The United States currently leads the world in the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus. At the moment, more than 189.6 thousand cases of infection and 4,079 deaths recorded in the country.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged in late 2019 in China's Hubei province, and the virus has spread to 200 countries and territories since then.

On February 11, the WHO officially named the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as COVID-19, and on March 11, declared it a pandemic.