by Calculated Risk on 3/25/2020 04:53:00 PM

Tests per day is a key number to track (along with actual cases and, sadly, deaths). But total tests were a key for South Korea slowing the spread of COVID-19. South Korea has been conducting 15,000 to 20,000 tests per day with a 51 million population, so the US needs to test around 130,000 per day.

Note: NYC and LA have stopped testing mild cases due to resource constraints. Hopefully testing will continue to improve, and we can test more people - this is important for test-and-trace.

The US conducted 74,384 tests in the last 24 hours.

Note: About 16% of tests were positive in the most recent report (some are still pending). The high percentage of positives indicates limited testing.   For Test-and-trace to be effective, the percent positive would probably be at 5% or less.

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project. Some states could do a better job of reporting the number of tests - so this is probably low.

Testing is improving, but needs to still increase significantly from here to be sufficient for test-and-trace.

Test. Test. Test. But protect our healthcare workers first!