US president Donald Trump has said if the UK had stuck with its initial coronavirus strategy it would have been 'catastrophic'.

The president said that the original strategy of allowing the virus to spread in order to achieve resistance to the virus in the population, would have caused millions of deaths if adopted in the US.

The UK reportedly abandoned its original plan for the population to achieve 'herd immunity' after experts warned it would result in up to 250,000 deaths.

The President told a press conference he's learned from the UK approach and won't 'ride it out'.

"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] or more… in a relatively short period of time.

"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.

"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."