US national flags representing the 200,000 lives lost to COVID-19 in the United States are placed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the United States, on Sep 22, 2020.Photo:Xinhua

The United States should take much of the blame for a wider global spread of COVID-19, which has caused more than 278 million infections and nearly 5.4 million deaths worldwide and is still hampering global recovery.

In the early days of the pandemic, the United States acted slowly and irresponsibly. Its top government officials repeatedly played down the risk of the coronavirus to the general public and even compared it to a common flu on purpose, hence a disastrous response to the public health crisis.

While turning a deaf ear to warnings from the international community and health experts, the White House failed to roll out epidemic prevention guidelines and measures in a timely manner, and allowed COVID-19 to spread unchecked across the entire country. That is a major reason why the United States quickly evolved into an epicenter of the global pandemic and is still burdened with both the world's highest caseload and highest death toll.

The country's crisis management has also fallen victim to partisanship and political polarization. Throughout much of the pandemic in the United States, rival parties have been casting blame on each other rather than bridging their differences and working together to contain the pandemic and save more lives. Certain politicians and political forces have maliciously formulated conspiracy theories, letting political self-interests override facts and the public good.

Besides, when most countries chose to limit human mobility to fight the pandemic, the United States adopted a laissez-faire policy by relaxing domestic and international travel in a premature move believed to have led to COVID-19 outbreaks in other parts of the world.

At least 12 countries have reported that their "patient zero" of COVID-19 came from the United States. Canada said in April 2020 that the country's early cases mainly came from the United States.

In August 2020, the US State Department moved recklessly to lift a previously-issued advisory that had warned citizens against traveling abroad, on the self-deceiving grounds that the pandemic had been under control, with a blithe disregard for a quarter of the total global infections occurring on its territory.

The United States witnessed a peak in the COVID-19 pandemic from November 2020 to January 2021, with an average of daily confirmed cases reaching 186,000, and the number of Americans traveling abroad hitting a high point of 87,000 per day, according to official data. The overlapping is believed to have contributed to a large spillover of the pathogen from the United States.

Furthermore, the United States has pushed up imported cases in multiple countries by deporting undocumented immigrants during the pandemic, while its troops overseas were reported to have violated epidemic prevention protocols in several countries, speeding up transmission of the virus. Washington has also cold-heartedly refused to lift sanctions on certain countries in urgent need of medical supplies.

Under no circumstances, as facts have shown, could the United States shirk the responsibility for the raging pandemic worldwide. The country's botched response to the public health crisis, as well as what it has added to the woes of humanity in times of such hardships, will surely go down in history disgracefully.