WASHINGTON — The Trump administration sent mixed signals on Tuesday about how quickly testing for the coronavirus would ramp up, stressing that close to a million coronavirus tests should be available this week but also that the number of tests to be administered remained unknown.
Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said at a Senate hearing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was working with a private manufacturer to drastically increase the testing capacity of laboratories across the nation.
“Our expectation in talking to the company that is scaling this up is that we should have the capacity by the end of the week to have kits available to the laboratories to perform about a million tests,” he said.
White House officials, however, stressed that the number of tests actually administered could be considerably lower. When Dr. Hahn was asked to clarify, he said that he was hearing from private manufacturers that 2,500 test kits could be available by the end of the week, with each kit capable of 500 tests.
“This is a dynamic process,” Dr. Hahn said. “Every day we’re hearing from additional manufacturers.”
The F.D.A. has said that Dr. Hahn was taking into account the anticipated production of test kits by Integrated DNA Technologies, which is now selling kits to the federal government and other buyers. But that would not increase the capacity of individual labs to perform the tests.
The confusion typified the struggle by the Trump administration to project confidence and progress without misleading the public about the virus’s spread. New infections in Westchester County, N.Y., San Mateo County, Calif., and Fulton County, Ga., since Monday evening made clear coronavirus was spreading in the sprawl of America’s largest urban centers and was no longer tethered to international travelers. In the United States, there have been at least 105 cases of coronavirus confirmed by lab tests as of Tuesday morning, and worldwide infections topped 92,200.
“I don’t think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed,” he said. “I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say, ‘boy, that was bad.’”
The number of tests that will be administered in the coming days could be substantially lower than the projection Dr. Hahn had offered. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday that public health labs currently can test 15,000 people, and could test up to 75,000 by the end of the week, numbers that fall well short of what Dr. Hahn suggested could result from private manufacturing.
The Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local government laboratories around the country, has said that its labs would be able to conduct about 10,000 tests a day when all of its 100 members that can perform testing are running. Scott Becker, the executive director of the lab association, said Monday that labs can run about 100 tests per day. As of Monday, he said fewer than half of those labs were able to do so.
Dr. Fauci told Politico that he would be truthful in his public pronouncements, even as President Trump sought to minimize the virus’s impact.
“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don’t want to go to war with a president,” Dr. Fauci told Politico in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
At several hearings across Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning, other Trump administration officials spoke to different elements of the federal response.
Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that he ordered a department field office in King County, Wash., to close for 14 days after learning that one of its employees visited a relative at Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., a nursing home where four of the six Americans who have died of the virus lived.
Mr. Wolf said he also directed employees at the field office to quarantine themselves for 14 days.
The employee visited Life Care Center before it became a focal point of the outbreak, Mr. Wolf said.
“This employee embodied leading by example,” Mr. Wolf said.
In another hearing, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said that the Trump administration is working with other countries to do everything possible to curb the spread of the virus and to limit damage to the global economy.
“The administration is closely monitoring the coronavirus and its effect on public health as well as any effects on supply chains, markets and the broader economy,” Mr. Mnuchin said, adding that the White House wanted to work closely with Congress for emergency funding.
Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told Mr. Mnuchin that any stimulus package should be centered around infrastructure investment rather than additional tax cuts.
“If there’s a need to stimulate the economy as a result of the coronavirus, I’m sure that infrastructure is a priority of the president,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
Mr. Mnuchin said the Trump administration was not considering rolling back or suspending its tariffs on Chinese imports to mitigate the economic effects of the coronavirus.
He said that the Treasury Department had set up a group to begin looking at tax measures that the Trump administration could take to provide relief to small and medium-sized businesses. He said that the White House could present proposals to Congress for such action if needed.
As the Trump administration officials testified, lawmakers were working on an emergency spending bill, hoping to pass it before a mid-March break. The legislation, which could be unveiled Tuesday, is expected to be worth $7 billion to $8 billion.
The package, which has been quickly negotiated over the past few days, is expected to be significantly larger than what the White House initially proposed eight days ago: $1.25 billion in new funds, paired with a transfer of existing funds from other health programs.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington, Katie Thomas from Chicago and Knvul Sheikh from New York.