White House coronavirus task force member Anthony Fauci says critics incorrectly believe that “testing is everything” as states prepare to reopen from the coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci, who enjoys broad respect among Democrats for his willingness to contradict President Trump, said testing concerns are over-hyped as Trump proposes that states pursue a phased reopening.

“The emphasis that we’ve been hearing is essentially ‘testing is everything’ and it isn’t,” Fauci said Friday night at a White House press conference.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke after Democrats spent Friday slamming Trump for pushing a reopening of states as reckless without broader testing.

Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, told Vice President Mike Pence on a Friday call that a lack of testing capacity was a “dereliction of duty.”

“I have never been so mad about a phone call in my life,” King told Pence.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) jeered Trump. “The president doesn’t want to help on testing,” Cuomo said Friday. “I said 11 times, I said the one issue we need help with is testing. He said, 11 times, ‘I don’t want to get involved with testing, it’s too complicated, it’s too hard.’”

Fauci likened new coronavirus infections to his experience with HIV/AIDS. He said people don’t contract the virus without risky behavior. For COVID-19, Fauci said that risk mitigation such as social distancing reduces the likelihood of catching the virus.

“It’s the kinds of things that we’ve been doing, the mitigation strategies that are an important part,” Fauci said.

“What we really needed for for Phase One is to be able to identify, isolate [and] contact trace,” Fauci said. “A very important part of when you’re pulling back gradually and slowly on the mitigation, and you have people who might be infected, you want to know they’re infected, you want to put them in care.”

Fauci said that with tests for infection for the virus, “a test means you’re negative now,” and does not guarantee a person would remain virus-free.

On Thursday, task force members announced that the federal government would have “sentinel” intelligence conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at nursing homes, at inner-city clinics and at Native American reservations.

As of Thursday, there were about 3.8 million coronavirus tests performed, of whom nearly 700,000 people tested positive. Fauci, an early critic of testing capacity, said Friday that problems were “corrected” with test processes.

CDC Director Robert Redfield displayed to reporters graphs showing spikes in respiratory illnesses over the past year, as indicated by long-standing surveillance at hospitals, with two influenza spikes and one for the coronavirus.

“It’s not just taking a test. It’s monitoring these systems,” Redfield told reporters at the White House press conference.

Right now, “we’re really coming down to the baseline background in terms of our flu surveillance system from the overall coronavirus situation right now,” Redfield said.

US Public Health Service Adm. Brett Giroir likened surveillance mechanism to weather radar.

“Just think of the weather radar,” he said. “If the weather radar is clear, you’re not going to have a thunderstorm or tornado.”