The director of the National Institutes of Health praised New York, New Jersey and Connecticut for taking effective measures to curb the spread of coronavirus, but said the virus is surging in much of the country because other states viewed coronavirus as a “New York problem.”

“Why are we doing so poorly?” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press. “We basically did a good job in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut with that terrible crisis that happened, and took many lives … and basically steps were put in place. And if you look to see what’s happening now in those areas, they came down very close to zero.”

Collins continued, “but meanwhile the rest of the country, perhaps imagining this was just a New York problem, kind of went about their business, didn’t really pay that much attention to CDC’s recommendations about the phases necessary to open up safely, and jumped over some of those hoops.”

Officials in states and cities across the country on Sunday called on the federal government to more forcefully confront the coronavirus pandemic. Health and government officials have expressed concern about the escalation, calling attention to an inability to conduct rapid testing and dwindling numbers of available ICU beds in hospitals.

Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) said on “Meet the Press” that “the national testing scene is a complete disgrace.” 

He said every test sent out to private lab partners, nationally, are generally processing results in about seven to nine days. That’s “almost useless from an epidemiological or even diagnostic perspective.”

He said the state’s own laboratory has done “yeoman’s work” to get test results processed quicker.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that his city was “on the brink” of needing to issue a new “stay-at-home” order.

“We’ve seen no national leadership,” he told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “We have had to do so much that is outside of our lane because of the lack of national leadership. But, also, I think that there are people who are just exhausted. They were sold a bill of goods. They said this was under control. They said this would be over soon. And I think, when leaders say that, people react and they do the wrong things. They stop distancing themselves. They stop washing their hands. They stop wearing masks.”

Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) recently issued a statewide “mask mandate” in order “to relieve the pressure on our hospitals to give us hope to bring down those cases,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Hutchinson said it’s a “balance that we’re trying to achieve.”

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said on CNN that 13 of 82 of the state’s counties have a mask mandate, but stopped short of calling for a statewide edict.

“I don’t understand how you can argue that we have to take a surgical approach to the coronavirus and then advocate for a top-down management approach from Washington,” he said. 

Reeves made the remarks after acknowledging an increasing number of coronavirus cases in Mississippi. “We certainly have more patients in ICU beds today than we have ever had with COVID-19. We have more patients on ventilators than we have ever had.”

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) said the coronavirus is raging in Florida and affecting “the working poor, it’s seniors, it’s now young people, and it’s totally out of control. We need to close down in Florida. We’ve asked the governor to do that.”

Referring to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, Shalala said, “we’ve even asked him to do the simplest thing, and that is to require masks for everyone. He has not done that.”

Scott Eidler covers Nassau County government and politics for Newsday. Scott has worked at Newsday since 2012 and previously covered municipal government and education.