Trump still doesn't understand severity of COVID-19 pandemic: CNN

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump still has not understood the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic as shown during his meeting with the White House coronavirus task force, according to CNN on Thursday.

Trump had a meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon, his first in-depth meeting with his top health experts since April, which showed that he still didn't fully grasp the severity of the pandemic, CNN quoted a source familiar with the meeting as saying.

During the meeting, some task force members continued to find it hard to convince Trump to take the pandemic more seriously, while the president tried multiple times to divert the subject to "something else," the source said.

In public, Trump "has been emphatic that his administration should get more credit for the work it has done," CNN reported, citing a broadcast of the "Fox and Friends" program on Wednesday morning when the president highlighted the rebound of the US economy and once again claimed that the virus was going to "go away."

Trump insisted that the pandemic "is under control" while his health experts have underscored that the coronavirus is now widespread in rural and urban areas around the country, according to CNN.

The United States has been the hardest-hit country by the pandemic for months, with 4,883,657 cases and 160,104 fatalities as of Friday, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.