A former Homeland Security adviser warned that the US is just over a week away from the nation’s hospitals “getting creamed” by the rapidly spreading coronavirus, reports said.

Tom Bossert, who served under President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018, told NBC News Tuesday the US is headed for the same sort of health care crisis Italy is experiencing.

In a Monday op-ed in the Washington Post, Bossert said it’s imperative for the country to “reduce the acute, exponential growth of the outbreak” as soon as possible “in order to reduce suffering and the strain on our health care system.

“The best way to put out the fire is a vaccine, but that is over a year away. In the meantime, we must focus on reducing the height of the outbreak curve,” Bossert wrote in the op-ed.

“This requires coordination and implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions. School closures, isolation of the sick, home quarantines of those who have come into contact with the sick, social distancing, telework and large-gathering cancellations must be implemented before the spread of the disease in any community reaches 1 percent.”

Once it reaches that point, those “interventions become far less effective,” Bossert cautioned.

So far, more than 121,000 people have been infected with the virus and more than 4,000 people have died worldwide. As of Wednesday, 1,135 people have been infected in the US.