The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that the U.S. is nearing the peak of its coronavirus outbreak and could reach it sometime this week.

"You'll know when you're at the peak when the next day is actually less than the day before," Robert Redfield told NBC's "Today" show about the pandemic.

The U.S. has undoubtedly secured it's spot as the hardest-hit country in the world, overtaking Italy on Saturday as the nation with the most reported deaths from the virus. Health officials report more than 22,100 deaths in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University.

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With nearly 560,000 cases, the U.S. has more than three times the infections of Spain, which reports the second-most cases at nearly 170,000.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to note that a disaster declaration has been issued in every state simultaneously for the first time in history and to reiterate his assertion that the U.S. is "winning" the fight against the pandemic.

"For the first time in history there is a fully signed Presidential Disaster Declaration for all 50 States," Trump tweeted. "We are winning, and will win, the war on the Invisible Enemy!"

Trump this week is expected to make a decision about funding for the World Health Organization, which he has threatened to pull after calling the group "China-centric."

The president also said he plans to announce members of his new "opening our country" task force on Tuesday.

While Trump has been pushing to reopen the economy as soon as possible, health officials have approached the topic more cautiously. Leading infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci on Sunday said not everything will reopen at once.

"It is not going to be a light switch that we say 'OK, it is now June or July or whatever, click, the light switch goes back on.' It is going to be depending on where you are in the country, the nature of the outbreak that you've already experienced and the threat of an outbreak that you may not have experienced," he said on CNN's "State of the Union."

Also on the show, Fauci acknowledged that implementing mitigation measures sooner would have saved lives.

"Obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different," he said. "But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then."

Many have praised Fauci as a steady advocate for science-based decision-making on the White House coronavirus task force, but some conservatives have suggested his frank comments undercut Trump. Questions about his future in the administration were raised after Trump on Sunday retweeted a post calling for the doctor to be fired.