Trump dismisses government coronavirus report despite model used by White House predicting sharp rise in US cases

President heads to Arizona for first trip since early March to tour a mask production facility

Donald Trump said he might wear a protective mask later Tuesday when he tours a plant in Arizona that has been producing the anti-coronavirus face gear, adding a government report predicting thousands more coronavirus deaths than projected previously is based on "no mitigation."

"I think it's a mask facility. If it's a mask facility, I will," he said of the Honeywell factory he will fly to on Air Force One.

And about that Centres for Disease Control and Prevention report that sees the number of Covid-19 deaths per day doubling by 1 June, the president said he is not concerned about states reopening their economies too quickly "because that assumes no mitigation. We're doing mitigation."

But that report includes a model that has been used by his own White House, and predicts the number of new cases per day could climb as high as 200,000.

"I've seen models that are very inaccurate. ... If we did this a different way, we would have lost more than 2m people," Mr Trump said, again claiming "we did everything right" even as Democrats and some public health officials continue to criticise what they see as a slow and uneven federal response – and, now, the president pushing states to reopen even as his own health advisers state clearly that the deadly virus is still spreading in both urban and rural areas.

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The president, who spoke to reporters both as he left the White House and before he boarded Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, made clear he is willing to put the recovery of the economy over tens of thousands of Americans getting sick or dying.

"If they held people any longer with the shutdowns, you'll lose people, too," he said of drug overdoses and other means of death. One reason the president said the economy can open back up is "they're washing their hands a lot."

There's no great win one way or the other. We're going to build a country. I did it once. ... We're going to do it again. And that's what we're starting.

Meantime, the president announced his top infectious disease official, Anthony Fauci, will not testify before a House oversight panel because, he claims, that committee's planned hearing is "a setup."

"They want our situation to be unsuccessful, and that means death," Mr Trump said, suggesting House Democrats want him to fail via Americans dying from Covid-19. "It's a bunch of Trump haters."

But, he said, Mr Fauci will appear before a Republican-majority Senate committee to testify about the federal Covid-19 response.