Donald Trump says Boris Johnson’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus response would’ve been ‘catastrophic’ – The Sun

DONALD Trump has claimed that the UK was facing "catastrophic" results and "a lot of death" before it changed strategy on how to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

The US president – himself under fire for his handling of the crisis – criticised Boris Johnson's initial strategy of "herd immunity" in a briefing at the White House.

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Mr Trump claimed the British government had "put themselves in a little bit of a problem" over its original plan to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak.

Addressing US measures, he added: "A lot of people were saying: 'Let's just ride it out'.

"This is not to be ridden out because then you would have been looking at potentially 2.2 million people (dying in the US).

"If you remember, they were looking at that concept – I guess it's a concept if you don't mind death, a lot of death – but they were looking at that in the UK, remember.

"All of sudden they went hard the other way because they started seeing things that weren't good. They put themselves in a little bit of a problem."

Mr Trump added: "They have a name for it, but we won't even go by the name – it would have been very catastrophic I think if that would have happened."

Initially Boris Johnson deliberately choose not to follow other European countries in closing schools and banning mass gatherings.

But after predictions that the UK could see 250,000 deaths, he ramped up the restrictive measures.

Before the change in strategy the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told Sky News that around 60 per cent of the UK population would need to become infected with coronavirus in order for a society to have "herd immunity" from outbreaks in the future.

Meanwhile during the briefing one of Donald Trump's experts revealed how she remains "worried" about the UK's lack of ventilators.

Dr Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, pointed out that the UK had a low number of ventilators compared with the US.

She said: "We are worried about groups all around the globe. I don't know if you heard the report this morning, there are 8,000 ventilators in the UK.

"If you translate that to United States, that would be like the United States having less than 40,000 ventilators. We have five times that."

On Tuesday Michael Gove said that the first batch of British-made ventilators will be rolled out to the NHS next week.

According to the cabinet minister, thousands are going into production to support the 8,000 already sent out to hospitals around the UK.