President Trump blamed China’s secrecy on the coronavirus as the cause of world “suffering” on Thursday and said had he not shut down travel from the communist nation, the U.S. death rate would be higher “by a factor of many, many, many.”

Clearly fed up with attacks in the media and from liberal critics over his repeated punching on China and the “China virus,” the president at his daily virus briefing just came out and blamed the country for the pandemic.

“It could have been stopped, could have been stopped pretty easily if we had known, if everybody had known about it, a number of months before people started reading about it,” he said.

“It could have been stopped in its tracks. Unfortunately, they didn’t decide to make it public, but the whole world is suffering because of it,” the president said.

Pressed by an NBC reporter, Trump said that his Jan. 11 decision to block travel from China helped to slow the spread in the United States, and he noted that the network ripped his action.

“It was your network, I believe, they called me a racist because I did that,” Trump said.

He added, “Had I let these tens of thousands of people come in from China a day, we would have had something right now that would have been, you wouldn’t even have recognized it, compared to where we are."

“How many people have passed away, how many people have died as of this moment? You could multiply that by a factor of many, many, many,” he said.

Trump has been under fire this week for his use of the phrase “China virus,” but is sticking with it, as is the rest of his administration.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, told Fox that China initially tried to hide the virus. Another official told Secrets this week that the world was kept in the dark for two months.

Pompeo said: “This disinformation campaign, which began when we began to call out this risk that was created not only for the Chinese people, but now we can see people all across the world where the Chinese government knew about this risk, had identified it, they were the first to know, and they wasted valuable days at the front end, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to leave Wuhan to go to places like Italy that’s now suffering so badly."

“They tried to suppress this information — you talked about the means by which they did it — instead of trying to actually do the work to suppress the virus, which is what the world demanded," he said. "And the Chinese Communist Party didn’t get it right and put countless lives at risk as a result of that.”