Announcing a travel ban affecting most of Europe in an Oval Office speech on March 11, President Donald Trump was scathing about the European response to the coronavirus crisis.

"The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots," Trump said.

On Thursday, the US overtook China and Italy as the country with most confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 85,500 positive tests.

Trump has been criticized for not doing more to slow the disease's spread in the early days of the outbreak.

Experts say his desire to lift lockdown measures by Easter could make the crisis worse.

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As the novel coronavirus swept through Europe in early March, President Donald Trump seized the opportunity to criticize the response of the European Union and boast of the success of the policies he had put in place.

"The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots," Trump said as he announced a ban on foreigners traveling to the US from most of Europe in a televised address from the Oval Office.

"As a result," he said, "a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe."

And in remarks at a meeting the next day with Irish leader Leo Varadkar, he boasted of the success of having shut down travel to the US from China and pointed at the trouble European countries were having.

"Leo, we closed very early with China and I took a lot of heat, including from your people, a lot of heat," Trump said. "They called me everything from a racist to everything else. It was terrible.

"The same people, then they say: 'Oh, he closed too fast. Why did he close?' Most of them said, 'Why did he close with China?' That turned out to be a great move."

This is what happened next in the US:

At the time of Trump's meeting with Varadkar, Europe was suffering, with worse to come.

Italy fast became the nation with the worst outbreak, having recorded more than 80,000 infections and 8,200 deaths as of Friday.

In Spain, images of hospital receptions filling with patients as intensive-care facilities reach capacity have shocked the world. The severity of its outbreak is fast approaching that of Italy.

But in some parts of Europe there are glimmers of hope, signs the comprehensive lockdowns in place for several weeks are beginning to work.

In Italy, the number of new cases has been in decline for several days now. In Germany, which has also taken serious distancing measures, the number of deaths is low despite a large number of cases.

In the US, the situation is very different.

In early March there were only a few hundred recorded US cases. As the end of March approaches, the US is the epicenter of the pandemic, its 80,500 confirmed COVID-19 cases surpassing Italy's and China's.

Experts consider the US to be relatively early in its outbreak and expect the situation to worsen.

It is now clear that at the same time Trump was boasting of the success of his travel bans he had underestimated the scale of the crisis ahead.

Across the US, hospitals are struggling to obtain vital lifesaving equipment, especially ventilators.

It was reported this week by The Guardian that only weeks after the president criticized European nations, his administration was behind the scenes asking those same allies for help procuring medical equipment.

The US is rapidly scaling up its diagnostic testing — but critics say the Trump administration's slow reactions effectively threw away any extra time his travel bans might have bought (their usefulness is disputed by experts).

When the US could have been establishing a national testing network, its leader was instead focused on talking down the likely impact of the pandemic.

Echoing lockdown measures put in place in China and Europe, the federal government released a 15-day advisory on March 16, requesting citizens to avoid all but essential excursions from the home, such as for food or to pharmacies.

Some states and cities imposed compulsory lockdowns, enforceable by law. But despite a few exceptions like San Francisco, the lockdowns are much milder than their European or Asian counterparts.

They are also planned to be briefer and have been accompanied by muddled messaging from the White House.

Despite the number of new cases in the US doubling every 2 1/2 days, Trump is already discussing lifting restrictions in as little as two weeks.

With hindsight, many argue that Italy and Spain worsened their outbreak by imposing lockdown measures gradually.

The US seems to be doing the same, with the federal government leaving state governors, mayors, and county-level officials to impose a patchwork of measures.

Trump, critics say, has to heed the lessons of the foreign nations he was not so long ago deriding and ensure that lockdown measures are properly enforced and given time to work.

In a streamed TED talk Thursday, Bill Gates said the US had "no choice" but "to maintain this isolation" for a period of time.

"In the Chinese case, it was like six weeks," he said, "so we have to prepare ourselves for that and do it very well."