Far behind in coronavirus testing

By Chris Mooney, Steven Mufson and Andrew Ba Tran
March 27, 2020 at 1:58 p.m. EDT

... “Just reported that the United States has done far more ‘testing’ than any other nation, by far!” Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning. “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!” ...

Germany has tested 483,295 people so far, according to the country’s Robert Koch Institute, an even higher total number than South Korea. That means that so far Germany has tested well over half a percent of its population, considerably more than the United States has done. And Germany’s numbers are set to increase rapidly from there.

The total number of tests in the country each week is now between 300,000 and 500,000, said health minister Jens Spahn. “Worldwide that should be the largest number of tests in any country, in absolute and relative numbers,” Spahn said.

If mortality is the ultimate measure, then the U.S. deaths as a percentage of total identified cases are three times higher than Norway’s and Germany’s. Only 16 people have thus far died of the virus in Norway and only 198 in Germany ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/27/coronavirus-testing-us/