US President Donald Trump has warned that China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian reported.

“It [COVID] could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it,” Trump said in his daily White House briefing on Saturday.

“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences,” Trump said.

But he did not elaborate on what form those consequences might take.

Trump added that the Chinese were “embarrassed” and the question now was whether what happened with the coronavirus was “a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately?”

“There’s a big difference between those two,” he said.