A doctor in the US state of Arizona has appealed to its Governor to re-instate a stay-at-home order to control the spread of the coronavirus.
The US has set daily records of COVID-19 cases, and surpassed three million cases.
One of the worst-affected states is Arizona.
Dr Matt Heinz works at a hospital in the city of Tucson.
He told Newstalk Breakfast the surge is down to "the leadership of Arizona" pushing too hard to re-open the state on May 15th.
"Everything was open - you could go to bars, you could go to restaurants inside, you could do mini-golf and certain types of movie theatres were even open at that point.
"That clearly precipitated, 21 days after May 15th - the first week of June - that's when everything started to go to hell, frankly, in the hospitals.
"That's about the lag time that you would expect once the virus is spreading around."
"The President visited Arizona about that time, a little bit earlier, around May 8th - and the Governor, I think to curry some favour, pushed some of the re-opening even more.
"It was like a soft re-opening on May 8th and then a full re-opening on May 15th - there wasn't really phase one, phase two, phase three."
"Nor do we qualify to even embrace any phase of re-opening, because we had not yet seen 14 consecutive days of decreasing new cases".
"What's so frustrating for me and I know for a lot of the nurses and doctors I work with, we hear the Governor like he did yesterday say how much he really really hopes that people will heed his advice and just stay inside and stay home.
"For the love of God man, you're the Governor - you can issue a stay-at-home order, which he did before.
"That's how you help decompress the hospitals and decrease the demand for critical care beds so that the healthcare workers can actually meet the demand that we have in front of us".
"Apparently it is being considered - but the press actually were great.
"The media just really jumped on him and said kind of what I just did, and he just kind of stumbled and bumbled around and moved on to some other topic.
"It is my hope that the Governor does this because that is what we need, at least for 30 if not 45 days.
"Instead, we're contemplating opening up schools - my God, I can't think of a worst thing to do right now".
"We have rampant community transmission of the virus here, we have a lot more folks showing up in the emergency departments and requiring hospitalisation, oxygen support, respiratory treatments and such."
"Actually even a lot more folks in their 20s, 30s and 40s have been showing up over the past several weeks - which is something we've all noticed a bit different than a month ago."
"It's pretty much across the board - this is an area where we have a lot of Latinos and I'm seeing a lot of Latinos affected.
"But I'm also seeing a lot of Caucasians, I'm seeing some African-Americans as well - there's a small population here in Arizona.
"I'm seeing pretty much across all demographics.
"Age-wise: I'm surprised that I'm not seeing more 60, 70, 80-year-olds - but we are seeing our fair share of younger 50s, 40s.
"I had a 24-year-old patient just recently who could not be sent home because she required oxygen.
"And she had no medical at-risk conditions: not a diabetic, not an asthmatic, no smoking history - nothing at all".
He said: "My 17 years in medicine in this state, we have never seen to this point the demand for just hospital beds - as well as of course unprecedented demand for critical care beds and unprecedented demand for ventilators.
"We still have ventilators, thankfully - we have few but we do have some critical care beds... and hospitals are now having to shuffle people around because transiently they will fill up their ICUs quite frequently and have to transfer from an ER to another facility that has an opening - even sometimes several hours away".
