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WASHINGTON, March 26-- With over 85,800 diagnosed COVID-19 cases by Thursday night, the United States has registered the highest national total in the world, and has also witnessed a rapid surge in confirmed cases, with a daily increase of over 10,000 daily over the past four days. While addressing a White House coronavirus task force briefing Thursday afternoon, U.S. President Donald Trump said the jump in cases is "a tribute to our testing." "We're doing tremendous testing," he said. According to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, 552,000 coronavirus tests have been completed in the United States by Thursday morning. In order to push quicker results to stem the tide of the COVID-19 outbreak, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first rapid coronavirus diagnostic test, with a detection time of about 45 minutes. Another point-of-care test from Abbott Laboratories, a U.S. medical devices and health care company, is awaiting the FDA's approval, which could offer results in less than 15 minutes, Pence said. While senior officials attributed the increase in cases to expanded testing, experts believed the slowness in instituting social distancing policies and the lag in prevention and control measures have resulted in the situation worsening. "We were not well prepared for COVID-19, both in terms of testing and instituting social distancing and taking the infection seriously," said Stanley Perlman, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, in an interview with Xinhua. | 
