The remarks from the surgeon general follow a flurry of actions by the administration in recent days meant to head off the coronavirus’ rapid spread within the U.S., including President Donald Trump’s declaration Friday of a national emergency and a recommendation Sunday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cancel or postpone all gatherings nationwide of at least 50 people for the next eight weeks.

Adams said Monday that those measures were taken in response to the U.S. reaching a “critical inflection point” in its fight against the coronavirus, which has spawned more than 3,700 reported cases across 49 states and resulted in at least 69 deaths. Because of limited testing capacity, experts agree the actual number of infected Americans is much more.

“People, we are where Italy was two weeks ago in terms of our numbers, and we have a choice to make as a nation: Do we want to go the direction of South Korea, and really be aggressive and lower our mortality rates, or do we want to go the direction of Italy?” Adams said.

“And when you look at the projections, there’s every chance that we could be Italy, but there’s every hope that we will be South Korea,” he added.

Although Adams said he could not offer a “specific time” when Americans could return to normalcy and discontinue preventative steps such as social distancing, he again hailed the response efforts of Chinese officials — whose authoritarian regime has shown signs of effectiveness in halting the coronavirus’ transmission.

“China really leaned into this, and we saw that it was about a couple months that they were able to see cases go down significantly. Same thing in South Korea,” Adams said. “We’re hopeful that if we lean into this, then maybe in about six to eight weeks, we’ll get over the majority of the pain, we will have flattened the curve, and we can start to slowly get back to life as normal.”