Federal officials are moving ahead with plans to address the screaming shortage of testing for the coronavirus by setting up many more drive-through testing centers around the country and speeding the capability of commercial laboratories to process multiple samples at once.

Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at a White House briefing with Vice President Mike Pence that starting on Monday, 2,000 commercial labs would begin to perform coronavirus tests using high-speed machines that can process many samples at once. Those labs are expected to add somewhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tests a week to the nation’s capacity, and 1.9 million tests should be available by the end of the week, Admiral Giroir said.

Some experts who have closely followed the government’s testing stumbles were skeptical that the federal government could meet such ambitious goals so quickly.

“We obviously welcome all the testing we can get our hands on right now in order to better elucidate what’s going on in our communities,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But given the experience of the last four to five weeks of promised testing that didn’t develop, I wait anxiously to see if this can be developed. Many of us will believe the testing ability when it happens.”