US Surgeon General Jerome Adams is pleading to social media influencers to tell young people to take the coronavirus pandemic more seriously, following reports of swarms of college students and teenagers heading to spring break as warnings that young people may be at "higher risk" of health issues than previously reported.

"What I really think we need to do was get our influencers" — calling out basketball stars Kevin Durant and Donavan Mitchell, as well as Kylie Jenner — "in helping folks understand this is serious", he told Good Morning America on Thursday. "People are dying out there."

Ms Jenner has more than 166m followers on Instagram and nearly 32m followers on Twitter. Mr Mitchell, Mr Durant and three of his teammates have tested positive for the virus.

The nation's top health official, who also serves on Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, told young people to "think about your grandmother [and] think about your grandfather. You're spreading disease and that could be what ultimately kills them."

His plea follows an Instagram message from Vanessa Hudgens, who told her more than 33m followers that "people are going to die" from the Covid-19 pandemic "which is terrible, but inevitable." She later apologised.

Mr Adams urged all Americans, including young people, to restrict non-essential travel, work from home and avoid groups of more than 10 people.

If people adhere to those guidelines, he said the US can "have our trajectory like China which overnight - good news - reported no new domestic cases", while a "worst-case scenario" in the US would play out similarly to Italy, where the death toll has surged past 2,500 this week.

"But we have a better-case scenario and China is reassuring", he added. "China shows us that if we do this, then in six to eight weeks we will hit our peak and start to come back down again."

The surgeon general said that those "little things that you do add up to big changes over time" and echoed other public health officials and city and state leaders who suggested to Americans that they "act as if you have the virus" and plan and move about accordingly.

Mr Adams said: "Whenever you're interacting with someone else, just imagine you have the virus and act as if you want to protect them or that they have the virus and you want to protect from getting it."

Asked about the lack of test kits for Covid-19, Mr Adams argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was never designed to provide millions of tests" despite the

Ms Jenner has told her followers to self-quarantine after she began doing the same.

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Instead, Mr Adams said the US focus is on "making sure people who are at highest risk, including our health care workers, critically important, and people who have symptoms can get tested."