The US has tested 25,000 for coronavirus. South Korea tests 10,000 a day.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say 25,000 people in the U.S. have been tested for coronavirus.
The number pales in comparison to other countries that have been hit hard by the global pandemic.
South Korea administers an average of 10,000 COVID-19 tests per day, according to the Washington Post. Italy has tested 134,000 people, the New York Times reported. Others countries, Including Australia, Austria and the United Kingdom, are also testing their citizens at a much higher rate, according to the Times.
The CDC said in a statement to the Washington Post the testing process in the U.S. “has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked.”
“CDC has a responsibility to ensure that all CDC laboratory research and development activities, testing processes, and data are the highest possible quality and are traceable, reproducible, and documented with appropriate rigor,” its statement said.
The CDC says 20,907 people have been tested in U.S. public health labs and 4,255 people have been tested in CDC labs.
But the actual number of tests being conducted in the country may be higher. The COVID Tracking Project, an internet community effort to track the number coronavirus cases, says nearly 50,000 people have been tested.
More than 4,600 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University.
The top official for the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, criticized some countries for not testing enough people, though he did not directly mention the United States.
“We have not seen an urgent enough escalation in testing, isolation and contact tracing, which is the backbone of the response,” he said. “We have a simple message for all countries: Test, test, test. Test every suspected case. If they test positive, isolate them and find out who they have been in contact with two days before they developed symptoms and test those people, too,” he said, according to CNBC.
WHO shipped 250,000 tests to more than 70 labs across the world on Feb. 6. There have now been 1.5 million test kits sent through WHO, the director said in a press briefing.
The U.S. developed its own test, but they have not been distributed as swiftly.
The U.S. should be testing 100,000 to 150,000 people a day, said Dr. Ashish Jha, Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
“They are making difficult decisions and that means preventing doctors who need the tests for critically ill patients from being able to test those patients,” Jha told MSNBC.
Commercial labs Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp told NBC News they have started testing for the COVID-19 and will be able to perform more than 10,000 daily tests by the end of this week.
Federal officials said Monday they will speed up testing at drive-thru centers and hope to have 1.9 million tests available by the end of the week, the New York Times reported.
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 10:00 AM with the headline "The US has tested 25,000 for coronavirus. South Korea tests 10,000 a day.."