A student wears a face mask to protect against COVID-19 as he leaves the campus of the UCLA college in Westwood, California on Friday. Photo: AFP

Medical staff worldwide are working around the clock to save patients infected with the novel coronavirus. Economists are cautiously calculating the economic effects of COVID-19 while pondering feasible solutions. At this same time, however, some US politicians are still busy lashing out at China.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday that the US response to the novel coronavirus epidemic has been hindered because it is "incredibly frustrating" to work with China to obtain relevant data. The voices from some of the top US politicians are sending confusing messages over how exactly the US situation is faring in terms of epidemic prevention and control. 

Setting aside the fact that a delegation of WHO that had personally come to China to work on the coronavirus outbreak did not even once raise doubts about related data and it is thus baffling how Pompeo came to this conclusion, making China the scapegoat for the epidemic in the US by nitpicking China's system from different angles cannot save the US.

For the moment, the epidemic is surging around the world. The number of global confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 100,000 on Friday, with the number in the US continuously climbing. It cannot be ruled out that the current COVID-19 outbreak in the US is just beginning. Against this time-sensitive backdrop, the priority for the US is saving patients while getting the spread of the virus under control.

It is easier to make groundless accusations against China, which will only divert the attention of some Americans, instead of solving the challenge confronting the US.

How the US responds to the epidemic will be and should be decided by Americans. As a country with strong national strength and the advantages of its own public health system, all the US needs to do is to focus on how to use these advantages to efficiently minimize the number of infections.

At this point, results will speak louder than arguments and disputes over different methods. 

The US should no longer waste time in attacking China's political system when it should be spending more energy in figuring out its own solutions and carrying them out effectively. Otherwise, if the epidemic breaks out in the US on a much larger scale than it has so far, it will be useless to blame anyone or any country.

It is time for US politicians to be more rational and acknowledge that only global cooperation is the solution to global crisis in the era of globalization. This is a matter of safeguarding the health of people in every country, which is a far cry from the US-launched high-tech competition against China, in which Washington believes that the only way to guarantee the US' dominant position in the world is to bring Beijing to its knees.

This is a fight against a deadly virus. This is not a race between different systems.