President Trump has taken pains over the past week to link the coronavirus outbreak to China, calling it the “Chinese virus” at daily briefings over objections that doing so unfairly stigmatizes an entire nation and might encourage hostility toward Asian-Americans.

On Wednesday, Trump was asked whether this practice was “racist.”

He calls the virus that, he said, “because it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate,” Trump replied.

While the Trump administration has been criticized for its response to the pandemic, especially delays in making tests available for the virus, Trump was correct that the virus originated in China, and that the Chinese government bears some responsibility for its spread by hiding and then minimizing the outbreak.

Trump also correctly pointed out that a Chinese government official tried to blame the U.S. for the outbreak.

The virus appears to have originated at Huanan live-animal market in Wuhan. Of the first 41 people infected with the virus, 27 had gone to the market, which sells and kills animals, some of them wild, for consumption, Vox reported. In 2002, officials traced the outbreak of the SARS virus to a market in southern China that also sold live, wild animals for food.

China’s so-called “wet markets” arose in the 1970s, when famine killed millions there. In 1978, China’s Communist government allowed private farming, and a decade later it legalized the private industry of raising and selling wildlife.

The unsanitary conditions of these markets and storage of animals in crates on top of one another has been blamed for the transmission of viruses between species. In the initial stages of the SARS outbreak, Chinese officials withheld information on the number of people infected and later conceded it was “not well prepared” for the epidemic.

A timeline of the coronavirus outbreak shows that an all-too-similar pattern has reemerged.

Dec. 10, 2019: A 57-year-old seafood merchant at Huanan Market named Wei Guixian falls ill in what is believed to be the first case of COVID-19. Days later, he is hospitalized.

Dec. 30: After other food vendors at the market in Wuhan become sick with a mysterious pneumonia-like illness, Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, participates in a meeting on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media network, with seven other doctors. The topic of conversation is a growing number of cases in which patients undergo a rapid deterioration linked to respiratory failure. Wenliang warns that the illness resembles SARS, which went on to kill more than 800 people in 17 countries.

Dec. 31: The Chinese government publicly confirms that dozens of patients in Wuhan are being treated for a pneumonia-like condition.

Jan. 1, 2020: Wuhan police announce they have “taken legal measures” against Wenliang and the other doctors to silence them from spreading “rumors” about the virus. Read more

Read also:Pelosi calls on Trump to use Defense Production Act