Virus Testing is up Overall, but Some States May be Falling Behind

As businesses reopened Friday in more of the U.S., an overwhelming majority of states still fall short of the COVID-19 testing levels that public health experts say are necessary to safely ease lockdowns and avoid another deadly wave of outbreaks, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Rapid, widespread testing is considered essential to tracking and containing the coronavirus. But 41 of the nation’s 50 states fail to test widely enough to drive their infections below a key benchmark, according to an AP analysis of metrics developed by Harvard’s Global Health...

After an April that some experts described as “wasted,” it looks like America is finally making some real progress on coronavirus testing in May.

Over the past couple of weeks, the United States has seen significant improvements not just with the raw number of Covid-19 tests but also with other metrics experts use to gauge the scope of the US’s coronavirus outbreak and its testing capacity.

During the week of May 5, the US averaged nearly 300,000 new coronavirus tests a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That’s nearly...