US ‘conducting full-scale investigation to find out if coronavirus escaped from Wuhan lab’

THE U.S. is investigating if the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China — causing the global pandemic that’s killed more than 156,000 people worldwide.

Fox News reported on Friday that the intelligence community into the lab, and are trying to create “an accurate picture of what happened.”

The news outlet , citing multiple sources, that the virus started in a Wuhan Institute of Virology lab as part of China’s effort to show the country has the same capabilities of identifying and as the U.S.

Sources are now telling Fox News intelligence officials are gathering information about the Wuhan lab and trying to form a timeline of what the knew and when.

Once U.S. officials finish their investigation — which is said to be soon — the findings will be brought to , and from there, the White House can determine how to hold China accountable.

Experts estimate that China didn’t tell the public about the coronavirus until seven days after officials determined they were likely facing a pandemic, The Associated Press .

President Xi Jinping warned the public about the virus on January 20 — when more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence.

During the six days the world was unaware of the virus, the city of Wuhan — the epicenter of the global outbreak — hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people, and millions began to travel through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

On March 11, the virus was by the World Health Organization.

Officials told Fox News they’re not considering the coronavirus to be “man-made or engineered inside China as some sort of bioweapon.”

Sources said the initial transmission of the virus was a “naturally occurring strain that was being studied there — and then went into the population in Wuhan.”

The investigation has reportedly pointed officials to Dr. Shi Zhengli, who had been working on antivirals and immunizations for coronavirus — specifically with bats.

U.S. officials are 100 per cent confident that China went to “great lengths to cover up” after the coronavirus broke out, sources told Fox News.

On Wednesday, said during a press conference: “More and more we’re hearing the story…we are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation.”

Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, , told the AP the length of time it took China to warn the public about the virus was “tremendous.”

“If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”

Some experts said the Chinese government could have waited on warning the public to hold off on hysteria, and that it might have acted quickly in private.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the WHO.

And on Thursday, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said: “The head of the WHO has stated many times that there is no evidence that the new coronavirus originated in the laboratory.”

“Many prominent medical experts in the world also believe that the so-called laboratory leaks have no scientific basis.”

Trump has blamed WHO for the global outbreak and claimed that “worldwide economic damage” could have been avoided if the organization had not taken “China’s assurances at face value.”

, saying the U.S. shouldn’t fund the organization with $500 million given its inaction — and said it was not “fair” given China had only given around $42 million.

As of Saturday, more than 2.2 million people across the globe had tested positive for the coronavirus.

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