The White House on Monday confirmed plans to distribute $11 billion to states to help fund testing, as part of a growing effort to ramp up testing across the country.
A senior administration official said that nearly nine million coronavirus tests had been completed and ten million tests were expected to be finished by the end of the week.
“We’ve done a tremendous number and that number is accelerating even quicker,” the official said.
The funding will be taken from the CARES Act passed by Congress in April.
The administration continues coordinating with governors and local officials to ramp up testing, working to match their testing needs. The goal is to make sure every state has what they need for phase two of the reopening strategy.
Officials criticized Democrat governors for complaining about the Trump administration’s failure to ramp up testing, saying that many of the critics were silenced by Trump’s success.
“You’re noticing that a lot of the governors who have been a little hostile to the administration, now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Oh we’re figuring out how to do testing.'” The official said. “It’s not a miracle, it’s not that all of a sudden they’ve figured it out, it’s that we’ve held their hand, and we’ve helped them get the supplies they need, and we’ve explained to them how to do it, and so a lot of them are starting to take credit.”