Nearly millions of Americans have already been tested for the coronavirus.
Increased testing in the United States has led to one of the highest capita testing rates in the world: more than 11,800 tests per 1 million people. Italy tops the list, however, with a rate almost twice that of the United States.
The UK and Turkey, meanwhile, have performed about 7,600 and 7,500 tests per capita, respectively.
In total, all these tests have confirmed 2.5 million coronavirus infections worldwide. At least 168,500 people have died from COVID-19.
Six weeks ago, the United States was woefully behind South Korea in terms of capita testing rate. As of March 8, the total number of tests performed by millions of citizens in South Korea was approximately 700 times that of the United States, even though both countries announced their first coronavirus cases on the same day.
In the US, faulty kits and delays in the widespread rollout of tests have hampered public-health authorities’ ability to accurately determine how many Americans have gotten the virus.
As of early March, the United States had conducted fewer COVID-19 tests per capita than many countries facing giant coronavirus outbreaks: just five tests per million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The graphs above compare the number of diagnostic checks, which determine whether a user has an active COVID-19 infection, between countries. These checks involve taking samples of mucus and saliva and performing a laboratory check to see if those samples involve the coronavirus genome array. .
Antibody tests, by contrast, can help determine whether a person already had COVID-19 by examining their blood for coronavirus antibodies.
Read more: Tests are being carried out to find out if you are immune to the coronavirus. Here are the corporations rushing to integrate them into the US healthcare system.
Without enough testing for either type of testing, it is difficult for public health officials to determine how widespread the outbreak is or how fatal it is.
More widespread testing could change the known COVID-19 death rate, a basic calculation that divides the number of reported deaths by the number of confirmed cases. Experts expect that as reported case counts increase, countries’ death rates will drop.
But even with the sharp increase in testing in the US over the past six weeks, chances are many angry Americans are in the official case count.
That’s because many people who likely have mild cases COVID-19 aren’t being tested, and 25% and 50% of people infected with the virus show no symptoms, so probably aren’t included in the total, either.
To “fully remobilize the economy” in the United States, a new report from Harvard University experts suggests, the United States needs to test 20 million people around the clock through mid-summer. Currently, the United States screens fewer than 200,000 people each day.
Andy Kiersz contributed reporting to this story.
Gonna