Robert Schooley, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, said the country is seeing a rapid increase in cases in a number of cities, including New York City, New Orleans and Atlanta.
"Although some of this is because more testing is being done, we were slow to institute social distancing policies in a number of places," he said.
In Washington state where social distancing was begun much earlier than other states, the rise in cases is tailing off, which, hopefully, indicates that similar efforts instituted by a number of state governors will yield similar results, Schooley told Xinhua in an interview.
Experts said government officials should take steps in a more timely manner in an effort to have a maximal effect.
"If we wait until the hospitals begin filling up, social distancing has much less chance of slowing the epidemic than if measures are undertaken earlier," said Schooley.
"Our Mayor in San Diego, Kevin Faulconer, was one of the first mayors in the country to close the schools and issue a stay-at-home order. We seem to be benefiting from that now in that we have about the same number of patients in the hospital as we did a week ago," he said.
While the United States leads the world in confirmed cases, its death toll, standing at 1,290 by Thursday night, comes after countries such as Italy, Spain, China and France.
The reason for this is that the ages of COVID-19 patients in the United States tend to be younger than those of other countries, said Zhang Zuofeng, professor of epidemiology, and also associate dean for research at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles.
【国际英语资讯:Spotlight: Why U.S. leads world in diagnosed COVID-19 cases in short term】相关文章:
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