New York, Oct 26 (IANS): New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the Covid-19 crisis can be defeated, while questioning the White House's inaction as its Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that the country is "not going to control the pandemic".

"Americans don't surrender. And they didn't even put up a fight and what we learned in New York was if you put up a fight you would have won because New York won. Other states won also," Xinhua news agency quoted Cuomo as saying in an official statement on Sunday.

"In New York, we proved that we can control this virus," the Governor added in a tweet later.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday morning, Meadows said: "We're not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas."

When asked why the country wasn't going to to get control of the pandemic, the Chief of Staff replied: "Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu."

In the statement, Cuomo slammed Meadows' remark and said that the White House has "believed from the beginning that they can't control the virus".

"That's the only rationale that explains the denial and the lying. If you believed you could control it, then you'd try to control it; if you don't believe you can control it, then you lie about it and deny it and you minimize it.

"They surrendered without firing a shot. It was the great American surrender.

"If New York didn't control the virus, then the curve would have continued to go up and we would have had hundreds of thousands of people in our hospital system and we would have been overwhelmed.

"Flattening the curve is controlling the virus, right, by definition, friends President Trump, Commander-in-Chief, gets attacked by an enemy and his policy: pre-emptive capitulation.

"That's what they did and now we had 217,000 people dead because of pre-emptive capitulation," the Governor was quoted as further saying in the statement.

More than a half million lives could be lost to Covid-19 across the US by the end of February 2021, said researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in a study published in the Nature Medicine journal on October 24.

The prediction came a day after President Donald Trump said the coronavirus was "going away" in his final election debate with his DEmocratic rival Joe Biden, who warned of a "dark winter" and encouraged mask-wearing.

As of Monday morning, the total number of cases in the US stood at 8,633,194, while the death toll surged to 225,215, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

The two tallies are the highest in the world, making the US the worst-hit country by the pandemic.