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The United States is coming under increasing scrutiny as a result of the way the country has managed and mismanaged the outbreak of the coronavirus that has led to an unprecedented spike in the number of infections in the US which is now causing panic across the globe.

Recently a group of Congolese lawyers filed a criminal complaint against the US.

The National Bar Association Law office filed a petition to the Congolese Attorney General’s Office blaming President Trump and the US government for the spread of coronavirus (Covid-19) in the DRC. The lawyers in their plaint specifically blamed the US of not informing the rest of the world in order to avoid the virus and has thus exposed the Congolese population to Covid-19, which they said has led to “the decimation of the Congolese population of which 13 400 people are affected and 190 have already died in flagrant violation of article 7 of the statutes of Rome and of the International Criminal Court”.

The petitioners are blaming the United States on the grounds that the coronavirus was first reported in the US in September of 2019 but the US government did nothing to contain the spread of the virus to the rest of the world.

“Since September 2019, the report on the surveillance of the Covid-19 influenza in the United States by its director responsible for the centre for the prevention and control of epidemiological diseases Mr Robert Ladfield, published in the official websites that several Americans were already infected by the virus as at September 2019”.

The lawyers also noted that statistics from the United States medical services showed that as of March 7, 2020 more than 36 million Americans were already infected, 22 000 of whom have died from Covid-19 and the list is growing daily. As of March 11, 2020, the US government also publicly acknowledged on CNN that the coronavirus started to spread in its territory six months earlier (in September).

Furthermore, the New York State Governor Chris Cuomo had declared that he, his wife and two children were already infected with Covid-19 in October 2019. Similarly the US aircraft carrier Théodore Rossevelt which left the port of Santiago in Chile in January for the Philippine Sea had on board naval officers suffering from Covid-19. An indication that the virus started spreading in the US long before it was announced by Chinese officials. — Leadership.