Are you reassured yet?
If you watched his rally today you heard him going on and on and on about how the US is doing more testing than anyone in the world could have ever dreamed any nation could ever test.
Well:
The president reinforced the idea in a tweet on Wednesday: “Just reported that the United States has done far more ‘testing’ than any other nation, by far! In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!”
Trump is under enormous pressure over the availability of tests, and leaders both in Washington and around the world have held up South Korea as a benchmark country for comparison because of its rapid deployment of the tests.
There is no “official” U.S. government count of testing. Trump administration officials have said that’s partly because they didn’t want to slow down availability of the test by imposing uniform reporting requirements.
But the COVID Tracking Project website is collecting data from state and local governments and appears to be one of the more reliable sources in the nation on testing data.
The site has counted 367,710 coronavirus tests administered in the U.S. as of Wednesday. South Korea, by comparison, has conducted 357,896 tests, according to public health officials there. Assuming those numbers are accurate, the U.S. has exceeded South Korea in terms of raw tests.
But the huge difference in population adds an important piece of context to those figures.
The U.S. population is 328,239,523, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. South Korea’s is 51.8 million.
That means South Korea has tested roughly one in every 144 of its residents. In the U.S., the per capita testing rate is closer to one in every 900 residents.