Until recently, President Donald Trump did his best to tamp down on concerns about the novel coronavirus epidemic.

"One day it's like a miracle," he said in late February. "It will disappear."

That prophesy never materialized. A day after his prognostication, the United States' first recorded death from COVID-19 occurred.

A major factor in the US government's slow response to the pandemic can be attributed to the lack of coronavirus test kits developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that some White House aides learned only about the test shortage from the media, rather than public health officials within the government.

But even then, it wasn't until the first week of March that White House officials scrambled to address the testing shortage, according to the Journal. At the time, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC News that the US was "ramping up" production of testing kits, while also suggesting a shortage didn't exist.

"I'm not sure what he meant when he said there is no lab kit," he said in response to criticism from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The CDC was beset by several missteps while trying to develop test kits. Some of the agency's tests wrongly detected the new coronavirus in laboratory-grade water. An email, sent from a CDC official to state public-health-lab officials and viewed by the Journal, said some labs found "sporadic reactivity in the negative control of one of the three assay components."

But the CDC had already sent those kits to state public-health laboratories and had to retrieve them.

"It is unclear why quality control did not detect this issue before the kits were sent out to states," the email noted.

The CDC also ignored requests for expanded testing, and didn't provide adequate medical supplies to the private sector, the report says.