Donald Trump did not push to carry out widespread coronavirus testing because he believed higher confirmed case numbers could be damaging for his re-election campaign, reports have claimed.

The president is facing growing criticism over his administration’s failure to provide testing on a scale that could have limited the outbreak of Covid-19, with even Republicans in Congress speaking out.

The US has tested fewer than 12,000 people for the disease since January. In South Korea, authorities have been testing as many as 10,000 a day.

The low figure has been attributed in part to logjams at medical facilities and faulty diagnosis kits.

But the US president is also reported to have been reluctant to launch a campaign of “aggressive testing”, which could have identified key outbreak areas.

“That’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak,” said Dan Diamond, a Politico health reporter who has been investigating the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Speaking to NPR, he added: “The president had made clear – the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential re-election this fall.”

He said Mr Trump had failed to push for more urgent and widespread testing despite being warned by his health secretary Alex Azar that coronavirus threatened to become a “major” crisis.

The president has repeatedly fixated on "numbers" during the coronavirus outbreak. Discussing the thousands of passengers stranded on a virus-hit cruise ship off the coast of California, he expressed concern that letting them come ashore could increase US case numbers.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Mr Trump said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”​

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He has also compared the coronavirus death toll to that of common flu to provide a misleading picture of the new disease's threat, tweeting: "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Anthony Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, has warned coronavirus could be "10 times more lethal than seasonal flu".

He also admitted on Thursday that the US was “failing” at testing, contradicting Mr Trump's claims that “frankly, the testing has been going very smooth.”