Iran Press/ America: The White House rebuked the top US health agency saying "it let the country down" on providing testing crucial to the battle against the coronavirus outbreak.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been under intense scrutiny since producing a faulty test for COVID-19 that caused weeks of delays in the US response.
Critics have pointed out it could simply have accepted testing kits made by the World Health Organization, which has been producing them since late January, instead of insisting on developing its own.
"Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing," White House official Peter Navarro told NBC.
"Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back."
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 1,467,065 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 31,967 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 1,394 to 88,709.
Authorities are not seeing spikes in coronavirus cases in places that are reopening but are seeing increases in some areas that remain closed, US health secretary Alex Azar has said.
"We are seeing that in places that are opening; we're not seeing this spike in cases," Azar said on CNN's "State of the Union" program. "We still see spikes in some areas that are in fact close to very localized situations."
Meanwhile, the number of deaths in Washington state because of the new coronavirus has reached 1,000.
The Washington State Department of Health added eight more deaths and listed the total number of confirmed cases at 18,288.
Former President Barack Obama criticized US leaders over the handling of the coronavirus response, telling college graduates in an online commencement address that the pandemic shows many officials "aren't even pretending to be in charge".
"More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they're doing," Obama said without naming the president or other officials. "A lot them aren't even pretending to be in charge."
Globally, more than 4.7 million people have been infected and more than 315,000 have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Almost 1.7 million people have recovered.
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