Adequate testing from the start, would have helped

Posted on: March 10, 2020 at 10:24:26 CT

https://fortune.com/2020/03/03/coronavirus-us-test/

As U.S. cases spike, the Department of Health and Human Services has launched an investigation into defective testing kits that delayed lab results by several days, and experts are worried that a slow federal response may have given the virus more time to spread.

The lack of testing means that it is almost impossible to know how many Americans are infected with the coronavirus and suffering from COVID-19, the disease it causes. While our analysis has tracked state and local announcements that more than 570 people in 36 states are infected, experts say that number is almost certainly too small to reflect the full extent of the disease’s spread in the U.S. Not enough Americans have been tested for officials to know how many people are ill, they say.

The sluggish rollout of the tests has become a debilitating weakness in America’s response to the spread of the coronavirus. By this point in its outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people for the disease, and it was testing roughly 15,000 people every day. The United Kingdom, where three people have died of COVID-19, has already tested more than 24,900 people.


https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-testing-numbers/607714/

After surveying local data from across the country, we can only verify that 4,384 people have been tested for the coronavirus nationwide, as of today at 4 p.m. eastern time. These data are as comprehensive a compilation of official statistics as currently possible.