by Calculated Risk on 5/07/2020 04:57:00 PM

From NPR: U.S. Coronavirus Testing Still Falls Short. How's Your State Doing?

One prominent research group, Harvard's Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which had been between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.

Harvard's testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the United States is worse than projected earlier.

"Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying]," he says.

The US might be able to test 400,000 to 600,000 people per day sometime in May according to Dr. Fauci - and that might be enough. But the US might need even more tests according to Dr. Jha.

There were 318,720 test results reported over the last 24 hours (the number of tests yesterday were revised up).

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.

The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 8.7% (red line). The US probably needs enough tests to push  the percentage positive below 5%. (probably much lower based on testing in New Zealand).