US could have done much more amid COVID-19 outbreak, says doctor

BEIJING - The United States should have done much more to lower COVID-19 cases and deaths, as it had two-odd months to learn from China's anti-epidemic experience, a Chinese molecular neurobiologist has said.

"As the pandemic rages on in the United States and throughout the world, with some smaller outbreaks in China, the United States and China are not collaborating, but competing, in the search for a successful vaccine for the virus and treatment measures for the disease," Rao Yi, president of Capital Medical University in Beijing, wrote an opinion published on the New York Times on Wednesday.

Rao, who renounced his US citizenship a few years ago, said his 74-year-old uncle, who lived in New York, had died from the novel coronavirus, while all his relatives in the central Chinese city of Wuhan are safe.

"Uncle Eric died in New York after the pandemic had moved to the United States -- the world's strongest country militarily, the richest economically and the most advanced medically," said Rao.

Rao mentioned his 90-year-old father, a pulmonary physician, has been struggling to accept his younger brother's death, holding a view that Eric would have been saved in China.

The United States has reported more than 4.1 million COVID-19 cases with over 145,000 deaths, which are far higher than those in any other country or region, according to the latest Johns Hopkins University tally.

"For a long time, the United States seemed like the better place to live -- for those lucky enough to have such a choice," Rao said. "This time that outcome does not speak well of America."

"America was not the democratic beacon many of us had thought it to be," said Rao.