The White House on Friday said China “mishandled the situation” after the Coronavirus outbreak in its Wuhan city, but refrained from giving a definitive answer on retaliatory measures against the Asian giant.

The deadly Coronavirus that was first reported in China’s Wuhan city in mid-November has so far killed more than 2,35,000 people globally, including 64,000 Americans, and has infected 3.3 million across the world.

Leaders of the US, the UK and Germany increasingly believe that the unfortunate deaths of so many people and destruction of the global economy could have been avoided, if China had shown transparency and shared the information about the virus in its early phases.

Many countries have started talking about claiming compensation from China.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump had hinted at using tariff as a tool to punish China for mishandling the virus outbreak and the next day the markets went down.

“The markets are down substantially today after the President yesterday suggested in the East Room that he might use tariffs to punish China over the coronavirus. Is there any serious consideration being given to putting new tariffs on China or was the President just spitballing yesterday?” the new White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked during her maiden press conference.

“I won’t get ahead of any announcements from the President, but I will echo the President’s displeasure with China. It’s no secret that China mishandled this situation,” McEnany told reporters.

“Just a few examples for you; they did not share the genetic sequence until a professor in Shanghai did so on his own. The very next day China shut down his lab for quote rectification. They slow-walked information on human to human transmission alongside the World Health Organization and didn’t let US investigators in at a very important time,” she said.

“So, we take displeasure with China’s actions, but I certainly won’t get out of the President with those announcements. Again, when it comes to retaliatory measures, I will not get ahead of the president on that,” McEnany asserted.

The White House Press Secretary said the US continues to have very limited and dubious data from China and the current assessments indicated that Trump”s statement, that coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, is consistent with what some analysts believe is the epicenter of where the virus began.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump once again threatened China with fresh tariffs as he stepped up his attacks on Beijing over the COVID-19 crisis, saying he had seen evidence linking a Wuhan lab to the contagion, which has infected at least 3.2 million people so far.

Chinese city of Wuhan remained the epicentre of COVID-19 for a long time and novel coronavirus is believed to have originated late last year in its wet market that sold wild animals for human consumption, but speculation has swirled about a top-secret lab in the ground-zero city.

Asked if he had seen anything giving him a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak, Trump replied, “Yes, I have.”

As the United States is grappling with Coronavirus pandemic, having the most Coronavirus positive cases in the world, Trump suggested on Monday that he may seek damages from China over the COVOD-19 outbreak which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan and spread around the world.

Trump said at a White House briefing that “we are not happy with China, we are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could have been stopped at the source.”

Earlier, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had pressed China to allow inspectors into sensitive laboratories, voicing concern about their security amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Pompeo has refused to rule out that the deadly virus leaked out of a laboratory in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, a scenario strenuously denied by Beijing.

“You have to remember — these labs are still open inside of China these labs that contain complex pathogens that were being studied. It’s not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Pompeo told to media.

The Trump administration has also accused the Geneva-based agency, the World Health Organisation, of propagating “false information” and charged that its reliance on Chinese data had “likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide.”

(With agency inputs)