WASHINGTON, March 20 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Friday that the country is making efforts to secure more masks for health care workers as well as more ventilators for sick Americans who may need treatment.

"We continue at the President's direction to pursue every means to expand the supply of personal protective equipment," Pence told a White House daily press briefing.

"We have a policy of procuring, allocating as well as conserving the resources that we have in our system," he said, adding that the government has identified tens of thousands of ventilators that can be retrofitted and converted to help COVID-19 patients.

Pence urged every American to postpone elective medical procedures over concerns of insufficient ventilators.

With coronavirus cases soaring, doctors, nurses and other front-line medical workers across the United States are facing a dire shortage of masks, surgical gowns and eye gear to protect them from the virus.

U.S. President Donald Trump said the federal government will send "millions of masks" to states.

"We have millions of masks which are coming which are distributed to the states. The states are having a hard time getting them," Trump told reporters at the briefing.

Also on Friday, American company 3M said that since the COVID-19 outbreak, it has doubled its global output of N95 respirator masks to a rate of over 1.1 billion per year, or nearly 100 million per month.

The industrial giant is increasing its investments, primarily in the United States, to expand its global capacity by over 30 percent in the next 12 months, the company said.

"This pandemic is affecting us all, and we are doing all we can to support public health and especially our first-responders and those impacted by this global health crisis," said Mike Roman, chairman and chief executive officer of 3M.

The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 18,563 as of 19:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (2300 GMT) Friday, with 227 deaths, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.