Is Your State Doing Enough COVID-19 Testing?

Most of the United States has some kind of stay at home order in effect as a social distancing response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and many states have begun to gradually re-open businesses or are planning to do so in the near future. Some key factors that should drive the decision to nudge our lives closer to normal include getting the infection under control (seeing a declining number of new cases), having a contact tracing solution in place, and having adequate testing capacity.

It is well known that the US has had inadequate means to test for SARS-CoV-2 since the initial outbreak, and the problem was not adequately addressed as the infections grew to pandemic proportions. A recent analysis shows that more than half of US states aren’t doing enough COVID-19 testing, based on data from the COVID Tracking Project.

Based on the same data, the folks from NPR have created a graphic to illustrate how each state is performing in terms of current daily testing versus its minimum target.

The visualization displays the size of the outbreak for each state, as represented by deaths per 100,000 people, with a current peak value of 132 deaths per 100,000 people in New York. It also displays current daily testing versus a minimum target threshold that is needed by May 15, 2020, and this is measured as tests per 100,000 individuals. Most states are well below their May 15 target thresholds. Finally, the visualization shows the positive test ratio which is the percent of tests that come back with a positive result, and whose desired target is 10% or less.

How is your state doing?