We all know Trump has been brazenly lying when he says the US has tested more than any other country, when the only relevant measure is testing per capita, not in total. I hadn’t seen the same measure yet applied on a state by state basis, so I put together a couple of charts to see how the states were stacking up — and it quickly becomes obvious that, largely, southern states are dragging the chain when it comes to testing.
The following charts map the number of COVID-19 tests performed against the population of each State (plus Puerto Rico and D.C.). All testing and case data is from https://covidtracking.com/data/ as at 3/30/20 and 2019 population estimates are from Wikipedia. The first chart ranks by per-capita testing, with the US average highlighted in red. The second presents the same data in state name order to make it easier to pick out a particular state.
Whether this “southern lag” is due to a lack of availability of tests, a lazy (disbelieving?) attitude towards the pandemic, or deliberately downplaying numbers to keep on Trump’s good side, who knows? Clearly in the case of California it is the first option. But Texas? What is their excuse? The outbreak could be much worse there than reported and we would not know. This is very dangerous, not just for Texans but for the entire country.
While the MAGA-heads currently blame Blue States for spreading the virus, it’s obvious from this data that it’s mainly due to those states actually testing more and finding the cases — there could be just as many cases in Red States but they are going untested and unreported.
This is not intended to drive further fractures between Red and Blue States, it’s meant to say: we’re all in this together, so STOP those divisions and let’s all get on the same page with testing and mitigation of this damn virus.