Facing criticism, President Trump both defended current testing capacity and promised to facilitate more.

President Trump on Sunday said the administration was preparing to use the Defense Production Act to compel an unspecified US facility to increase production of test swabs by over 20 million per month.

The announcement came during his Sunday evening news conference, after he defended his response to the pandemic amid criticism from governors across the country claiming that there has been an insufficient amount of testing to justify reopening the economy any time soon.

“We are calling in the Defence Production Act,” . Trump said. He added, “You’ll have so many swabs you won’t know what to do with them.”

He provided no details about what company he was referring to, or when the administration would invoke the act. And his aides did not immediately respond when asked to provide more details.

“We already have millions coming in,” he said. “He added, “In all fairness, governors could get them themselves. But we are going to do it. We’ll work with the governors and if they can’t do it we’ll do it.”

Public health experts have said testing would need to at least double or even triple to justify even a partial reopening of the country’s economy, and business leaders reiterated that message in a conference call with Trump last week.

Seema Verma, the Medicaid and Medicare administrator, also announced on Sunday night that the administration was set to release guidelines for reopening the health care system to allow for elective procedures and surgeries.

“Not everything can be addressed by telehealth,” she said. “Maybe a woman who needs surgery for breast cancer. Somebody who has cataracts in their eyes, and sometimes the doctor needs to be able to listen to their patient’s heart.”

She cautioned that every state and local official would have to assess the situation on the ground before reopening.

Those state and local officials have been struggling to balance restrictions meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus against economic damage.

In Maryland and Virginia, governors said stay-at-home orders would remain in effect until they see decreases in the number of Covid-19 cases. And elsewhere in the nation, state officials said were seeking far more testing before easing restrictions, but continue to face shortages of supplies and testing kits.

“We are fighting a biological war,” governor Ralph Northam of Virginia said on the State of the Union programme on CNN. He added that governors have been forced “to fight that war without the supplies we need”.

Northam, a Democrat, said that Virginia lacked enough swabs for the amount of testing needed.

Governor Gretchen ?Whitmer of Michigan, another Democrat, said her state would like to “double or triple” the current number of tests “if we had the swabs or reagents”.

And governor Larry Hogan, a Maryland Republican, said: “It’s not accurate to say there’s plenty of testing out there and the governors should just get it done.”

Dr Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, rejected criticism that not enough people were being tested, saying on Sunday that not every community required high levels of testing. She said the government was trying “to predict community by community the testing that is needed”.