President Trump defended his “perfectly coordinated” response to the coronavirus epidemic today amid heavy criticism over health cuts and strategic blunders that have failed to stem its rapid spread.

The virus has reached 30 US states, killing at least 19 people, while Washington, D.C. announced its first case Saturday and 60 million people in California and New York state were under emergency orders.

Trump, who has been accused of peddling misinformation on the outbreak, blamed the media in an early morning tweet for trying to make his government “look bad” as criticism mounted with nearly 500 cases recorded.

“We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus,” Trump tweeted. “We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!”

But Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, criticized Trump’s messaging around the outbreak, telling NBC the president “hasn’t communicated the way I would, and the way I might like him to.”

Trump, the government official ultimately responsible for the response to the coronavirus outbreak, was in Florida today, at his private Mar-a-Lago resort.

He wasn’t at Mar-a-Lago all day, however.

He spent several hours at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.

The exact number of times Trump has played golf as president isn’t known because, unlike past administrations, this White House doesn’t share information about Trump’s activities at his golf clubs.

The latest estimate, considering contemporaneous reports and the weather at the time, Trump has played about 217 rounds of golf as president, once every five days.

He has visited one of his golf clubs on about 250 days as president, including his club in Bedminster, N.J., where he disappears from the public eye for weeks on end during the summer.

One tally of confirmed rounds of golf — as when his golf partners reveal that they played or when he is captured by other club members on social media — has the total at 116 rounds, a figure that Barack Obama didn’t hit until months into his second term.

Trump has been heavily rebuked for repeatedly contradicting the advice of his administration’s experts in his public pronouncements about the coronavirus.

He has downplayed the threat posed by the epidemic, which has killed more than 3,500 people since emerging in China, suggesting cases were “going very substantially down, not up,” falsely pledging that a vaccine would soon be available and claiming without evidence that the official estimate of the death rate was “false.”

From the start of February, the Trump administration focused on cutting off travel from China and imposing quarantines in an effort to keep the virus out of the United States.

Epidemiologists say the initial containment effort may have slowed the arrival of the virus but accuse the White House of wasting time with a strategy concerned more with the political narrative than domestic readiness.

Chief among the complaints has been the lack of testing caused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developing its own flawed kits, rather than using those approved by the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, critics point to deep CDC cuts and the White House’s removal of a position on the National Security Council for responding to pandemics.

“Many officials have a hand in this mess, but the president is the crucial variable,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a director of the Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Ebola outbreak, wrote in The New York Times on Saturday.

“Errors happen in any crisis. But when a president insists on claiming success irrespective of reality, it becomes much harder for those under him to acknowledge and correct mistakes.”

New York became the latest state over the weekend to declare an emergency as the number of patients there rose to 89.

The nation’s top expert on coronavirus warned Americans today to brace for quarantines and avoid large crowds.

Dr Anthony Fauci, admitted that early attempts to send out coronavirus test kits were plagued by delays, but said that testing capacity is ‘accelerating dramatically’.

‘Early on, there were some missteps with regard to the test and some technical aspects to it,’ Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

‘But right now, I believe, 1.1 million tests have already been sent out. By Monday, there’ll be an additional 400,000. And by the end of next week, probably around four million.’

Fauci said ‘we’re getting a better sense’ of the scope of the outbreak – adding: ‘Unfortunately that better sense is not encouraging because we’re seeing community spread.’

He repeatedly encouraged those most at risk from coronavirus to limit travel whenever possible.

‘If you’re a person with an underlying condition and you are particularly an elderly person with an underlying condition you need to think twice about getting on a plane, on a long trip, and not only think twice, just don’t get on a cruise ship,’ he said.

Asked about quarantines in China and Italy – where millions of people are confined to their homes – Fauci said he could not rule out similar actions in the United States.

‘You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, anything is possible, and that’s the reason why we’ve got to be prepared to take whatever action is appropriate to contain and mitigate the outbreak,’ he said on Fox News Sunday.