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According to new data from disease modelers at Columbia University, the country could have saved 36,000 lives if we had just locked down one week earlier.

Now, if you ask the president why he didn't ask the people stay in place sooner, he might blame China and the World Health Organization for not being clear enough about the dangers of the coronavirus early on.

The president's been going at China since he was campaigning, nothing new there, but the WHO beef is sort of fresh. It's sort of specific to this pandemic.

It started with some characteristic blame game, then it escalated to freezing funding and this week, President Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from the organization altogether if it doesn't embrace reforms.

Alex Ward, you've been covering this beef for Vox, where does it begin?

It goes back really to the start of the coronavirus.

China says the number of people infected by a mysterious respiratory virus has more than tripled over the weekend.

There are now 218 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus virus.

Trump was actually pretty happy with the World Health Organization and even China in the way that they were handling the early days. He praised the response.

I think he's doing it very professionally. I know this president, she loves the people of China, he loves his country and he's doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation.

And then, over time, Trump did not do too great with his coronavirus response and he was looking for a scapegoat and there were two pretty easy targets out there, the same things that he had just been praising, China and the World Health Organization.

They seem to be very China-centric. They called it wrong. They really, they missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known.

And they should have known. And they probably did know, so we'll be looking into that very carefully.

Early on, it became clear that there was an outbreak happening in Wuhan, which is well regarded as the origination point of the coronavirus.

The WHO was asking, hey, can we send some people into the city to observe what's happening? Can we offer some assistance? And China said no. And the WHO did not necessarily press that much.

There was even times where you had China saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the disease and the WHO boosted that message by tweeting this out and saying, there's no human-to-human transmission.

And even further, you had the WHO waiting quite some time before it actually called the coronavirus something worth worrying about.

Magnumistic, this is though an emergency in China. But it has not yet become a global health emergency.

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