Doing serious probe against China, may ask for heavy compensation: Trump

The United States is doing a "very serious" investigation against China, President Donald Trump said, indicating his administration is looking at a lot more money as compensation from Beijing than euro 130 billion being sought by Germany.

"Germany is looking at things and we're looking at things and we're talking about a lot more money than Germany is talking about," Trump told reporters at his White House news conference on Monday.

The deadly virus, which originated in China in mid-November has so far killed more than 200,000 people and infected over 3 million globally. The largest number of them are in the US: more than 56,000 deaths and over 1 million infections.

After the US, Europe has been the worst hit by the virus. In India, mainly because of the early and aggressive preventive measures, the fatalities have remained low at 886 and infections at 28,000.

Leaders of these countries including 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.

As such many countries have started talking about claiming compensation from China.

Trump, during the Rose Garden press conference, was asked about Germany planning to send a bill to China for euro 130 billion for the damages. Would your administration look at doing the same?

"Well, we can do something much easier than that. We have ways of doing things a lot easier than that," Trump replied. "We haven't determined the final amount yet, but it is very substantial".

"If you look at the world, I mean, this is a worldwide damage. This is a damage to the US but this is a damage to the world," said the US President.

Trump said there are "a lot of ways" one can hold China accountable for the spread of the virus. We're doing very serious investigations, as you probably know. We are not happy with China," he said.

"We are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could've been stopped at the source. It could've been stopped quickly and it wouldn't have spread all over the world. And we think that should have happened. So, we'll let you know at the appropriate time, but we are doing serious investigations," Trump said.

In recent weeks, there has been an increasing support towards the move to hold China accountable.

"China has been untruthful and unforthcoming since the beginning of this pandemic. We must hold them accountable for this cover up," Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said in a tweet.

Many had already been warning for years that China represented a dire threat to the world order, but Xi's mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis and subsequent evasion of responsibility are looking like the straw that broke the international community's back, say Western observers of China.

China may still sound confident, but this is a brash cover-up for serious domestic concerns.

China was forced to delay the so-called "two sessions", the annual National People's Congress (NPC) that was due to take place in early March, as well as the meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). This highly choreographed event rubber stamps government decisions and its budget.