A commercial aircraft carrying 80 tons of gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai arrived in New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sunday. Before that, China had been sending large quantities of protective equipment to Europe in order to help stem the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, arguments are circulating in Washington that delinking from China is the most urgent agenda for the U.S. In a recent essay in The American Interest, political scientist Andrew Michta used the virus to demand a "hard decoupling" from China.

The Atlantic published an article on Saturday written by Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, denouncing the claim, arguing that the declining relationship between Beijing and Washington is the very reason that Americans were left more vulnerable to the disease.

During the Bush administration, the secretary of health and human services helped establish a partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Health, and set up a department, which, in homage to its American counterpart, is also called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This cooperation enabled China to gain international experience and learn to cope with contagious outbreaks throughout the years. This has effectively saved the lives of Chinese people during public health emergencies, and in turn, saved the lives of Americans.

SARS hit China in late 2002. The CDC in Atlanta, U.S., sent 40 experts to assist China in battling SARS. The effort, according to Deborah Seligsohn, a Villanova University political scientist who worked on science and health issues at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007, "turned out to be strikingly successful." SARS was largely contained to Asia. Only 27 Americans were infected; none died.

During the Ebola breakout, the U.S. CDC had predicted nearly 1.4 million would contract the virus. And thanks to the laboratory in Sierra Leone built by China, the two counterparts worked together, and managed to contain the infection number to under 28,000 in West Africa.

When H7N9 emerged in 2013, "the Chinese and American CDCs collaborated throughout … by sharing epidemiological data and engaging in joint research." When Chinese researchers developed a vaccine first, they shared it with their American colleagues and quickly put it into production in the U.S.

Now that COVID-19 is sweeping across the United States, the Trump administration is stuck with the mentality, according to Beinart, that "if you have collaborative research with Chinese scientists, you're helping China to build their capacity, and that's not good for the U.S., because China is a strategic competitor."

While American doctors and nurses are desperately in need of masks, goggles, gloves, gowns and thermometers, less of that medical equipment is crossing the U.S. border because of the tariffs put on pharmaceutical products from China as part of Trump's trade war with the country.

Meanwhile, Trump implied during a press conference on Sunday that hospitals are to blame for the shortage of the medical supplies.

"How do you go from [10,000] to 20,000 masks [prior to the pandemic] – to 300,000 …" he said, "Something's going on. And you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?"

The lesson learned from the coronavirus, according to Beinart, is that the U.S. must cooperate more deeply with China, and Washington must come to realize its losing power "to dictate the terms on which that cooperation occurs."

It might be "excruciating" for the decouplers to embrace the reality, but "the more they resist them, the more Americans will die."