COVID-19: Has The U.S. Closed The Testing Gap?

The United States has been heavily criticized for its slow response to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the CDC's fumbled development of testing kits. That delay meant that the U.S. had conducted just 125 tests per million of its inhabitants by mid-March compared to 5,567 tests per million people in South Korea and 2,514 per million in Italy.

The U.S. has now finally ratcheted up testing and the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 stood at 337,646 as of April 06, 2020 at 3am EST according to the Johns Hopkins University. Despite the improvement, the U.S. still lags behind other countries in testing and according to the latest data published by Worldometers, it had conducted 5,355 tests per million inhabitants by April 06.

That is still behind a long list of countries including Canada with 8,767 tests per million of the population and Germany with 10,962 tests per million inhabitants.