Fast-acting countries cut their coronavirus death rates while US delays cost thousands of lives

If cities across the U.S. had moved just one week faster to shut down restaurants and businesses and order residents to stay home, they could have avoided over 35,000 coronavirus deaths by early May, new research suggests. If they had moved two weeks earlier, more than 50,000 people who died from the pandemic might still be alive. Those U.S. estimates, from a modeling study released May 20 by researchers at Columbia University, came to similar…