“We want to have it and we’re going to see if we have it. Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes,” Trump said. “We’re talking about 325 million people. And that’s not going to happen, as you can imagine, and it would never happen with anyone else either.”

But experts say that widespread testing is a crucial step.

Easing blunt measures like stay-at-home orders requires enough widespread testing to identify infected people so they can be isolated and people they’ve been in contact with notified, they say.

While some progress has been made on testing, experts say the U.S. is not at the level it needs to be to achieve that.