US failing to contain COVID-19, experts warn

The US was still not doing enough to contain the spread of the coronavirus, experts told CNN.

"We need to take ownership of this and implement a federal plan by which we bring every state to containment by October," said Dr Peter Hotez, a professor and Dean of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, adding that some states in the US have been able to do that already.

"But other parts of the country have a lot of work to do," he told CNN.

"The point is," Hotez added, "it's all doable if we have leadership at the White House that tells us we need to do this."

The US had more than 5.19 million confirmed cases as of Thursday afternoon, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 166,000 people have died due to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.

However, health experts have predicted that the death toll in the US will get worse through the year, and many have called for a stronger national leadership against the virus.

One model from the Institute of Health and Metric Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington projects nearly 300,000 deaths in the US by Dec 1.

Americans are still moving around too much to adequately slow the spread of the virus, Dr Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, told CNN.

"If you look at the mobility data collected from cell phones in many parts of the country, we're almost back to pre-COVID levels of mobility, so we're just not being as cautious as other people are in other countries," Murray said.

Currently, only symptomatic people are frequently tested, meaning 40 to 50 percent of all spreaders, those who don't show symptoms, are not being tested and told they may be contagious, Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former USAID administrator, said.

"You have to know that as soon as possible, and then limit transmission from that node of contagion," he said. "That's the whole ball game."

But even testing primarily symptomatic people have been affected by backlog in many states in the country.