Coronavirus Task Force believes more lives could have been saved if Trump acted sooner: report

Despite what the White House is saying, the Coronavirus Task Force does believe that American lives could have been saved if President Donald Trump had acted sooner, according to a source close to the taskforce.

CNN reported Wednesday that the White House is still claiming that they did "everything right," in responding to the coronavirus. For those watching the news for the past several news, supplies couldn't have been acquired faster. While the country was having a run on toilet paper, the White House was still struggling to explain to people why they shouldn't panic. As we head into April, however, that has changed.

"It all depends, the source said, whether there were coronavirus infections in the US that were going undetected during the initial weeks of the outbreak, when the Trump administration was falling behind on testing for the virus nationwide," CNN reported. "Numerous public health experts have said those cases were likely going undetected, considering the lack of widespread testing."

"If there were no infections out there, then there was nothing to mitigate," the source told CNN. "If there were infections under the radar, it might have made a difference."

A Trump adviser told CNN's Jim Acosta that the president "took a gamble" that the virus would be gone once the weather got warmer.

"You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We're in great shape though. We have 12 cases -- 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now," Trump said on Feb. 10.

The World Health Organization said that it isn't confirmed.

In Trump's case, that "gamble" means American lives were lost.

During an interview with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer probed why the president refused to believe the experts for so long. He quoted many of the times the president downplayed the virus, called it nothing more than the flu and that only elderly people could get the virus. All the while, the experts on the task force were trying to warn against the misinformation.

"I don't believe the President has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus," Pence claimed. he went on to say Trump was simply "optimistic."

Read the full CNN report.