Despite Trump’s claims, the U.S. is far behind in coronavirus testing

President Trump gave the United States a pat on the back on this week, saying the nation had done more coronavirus testing than South Korea, a country widely seen as a model in its management of the pandemic. But his comparison was misleading.

“Just reported that the United States has done far more ‘testing’ than any other nation, by far!” Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning. “In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!”

The United States, which now has the largest outbreak in the world, was very late to the testing game. But the country has indeed scaled up from extremely low levels. It had done 540,718 tests as of Friday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

But the U.S. population is more than six times South Korea’s. As of Friday, South Korea had tested 376,961 people, or 0.7 percent of its 2018 population of 51.6 million.

In comparison, the United States has still tested only about 0.2 percent of its population, based on these figures.

The fact that the United States lags is due “to a lot of things, including shortages of not only tests but the stuff to purify RNA and even swabs to collect samples,” said William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard.