I wish we had more data. For example, it would be nice to know the reason for the tests – for example, was the testing because of symptoms? Or close contact with an infected person? Or a regular test for a healthcare worker? Or precautionary for elective surgery? Etc. It would be great to know the number of people tested as opposed to the number of tests. But we are lucky to have this data (thanks to the hard work of the volunteers at the COVID Tracking Project
Note: I started posting this graph when the US was doing a few thousand tests per day. Clearly the US was way under testing early in the pandemic. I’ll continue posting this graph daily at least until the percent positive is continuously under 3% and the daily positive is significantly lower than today.
The US is now conducting over 400,000 tests per day, and that might be enough to allow test-and-trace in some areas. Based on the experience of other countries, the percent positive needs to be well under 5% to really push down new infections, so the US still needs to increase the number of tests per day significantly.
According to Dr. Jha of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, the US might need more than 900,000 tests per day .
There were 464,715 test results reported over the last 24 hours. There were 23,498 positive tests.
Click on graph for larger image.
This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.
The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 5.1% (red line).
For the status of contact tracing by state, check out testandtrace.com.