WASHINGTON -- The United States "is too broken to fight" the novel coronavirus, and "no other developed country is doing so badly," a columnist for The New York Times wrote on Monday.

"Graphs of the coronavirus curves in Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy look like mountains, with steep climbs up and then back down. The one for America shows a fast climb up to a plateau. For a while, the number of new cases in the US was at least slowly declining. Now, according to The Times, it's up a terrifying 22 percent over the last 14 days," wrote Michelle Goldberg in an opinion.

"This is what American exceptionalism looks like under Donald Trump. It's not just that the United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any country in the world. Republican political dysfunction has made a coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible," Goldberg wrote.

"At the federal level as well as in many states, we're seeing a combination of the blustering contempt for science that marks the conservative approach to climate change and the high tolerance for carnage that makes American gun culture unique," she said.

"So while countries with competent leadership haltingly return to normal, ours will continue to be pummeled," she added.

US COVID-19 deaths surpassed 120,000 on Monday with nearly 2.3 million infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.