America’s COVID-19 testing has stalled, and that’s a big problem

Enlarge / After growing exponentially for most of March, US testing has stalled out at around 100,000 tests per day. (credit: Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica)

One of America's biggest fumbles in the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis was inadequate testing. Thanks to a series of poor decisions by federal officials, the United States had far too little capacity to test for COVID-19 throughout the month of February, hampering our ability to contain the spread of the virus.

In early March, things seemed to be turning around. According to data from COVID Tracking Project, daily testing grew exponentially from a few hundred tests on March 5 to 107,000 tests last Friday, March 27.

But since then, progress has stalled. The US has been testing a bit over 100,000 people a day for the last six days-including 101,000 yesterday. And that's a cause for concern because the US will need to do considerably more testing to get its coronavirus outbreak under control.

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