The media says COVID-19 testing rates are much higher than they were initially, and that this fact might help explain some of the increase in diagnosed cases. Out President says we should SLOW TESTING DOWN because we are finding new cases. He says this trying to imply to his base that testing causes cases when, of course, more cases make him look bad. Scientists have been saying for some time that by this point we should have between 5 and 10 million tests per day to safely open.
In other words, everyone should be tested monthly or every two weeks for the virus. Our 7-day average of daily COVID-19 tests as of June 27th is 541,283 tests. And if you look at the bar chart and trend line below, THERE IS NO SURGE!
What we see from the data is the gradual rise in testing numbers over time. If there was a surge at any time, it happened back in mid-May and then it faded away. So any talk about how the increased test is responsible for the current surge in confirmed infections is just not accurate.
And our testing numbers are not good when compared with other countries. We are 26th in the world for tests per million. We are orders of magnitude away from a goal that will allow us to safely open up our economy and track down new infections.
Since this author is the source of the seven-day moving average of the daily testing numbers in the United States (there may be other sources elsewhere), the table is included below. The start date for the data is as of May 2, 2020, making May 8th the first day of the seven-day average. The data is also published on my blog [ aseyeseesit.blogspot.com/… ].
View all the daily data collection and commentary here.