Just nine US states are close to or have surpassed the coronavirus testing minimums needed to reopen, new data reveals.
The states are mostly out in the West and not very populated, and include Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
All of those states are seeing 10 percent or fewer positive COVID-19 results, according to the estimations from Harvard Global Health Institute, obtained exclusively by NPR.
Meanwhile, states with large outbreaks including California, Michigan, New Jersey and the US epicenter New York, are nowhere near the minimum.
The findings are a reminder of why reopening states too quickly could lead to a new, fatal spike in cases.
Just Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming are doing enough coronavirus testing to reopen. Pictured: Nurse Molly Spaeny (right) with St Vincent Healthcare swabs a patient for a coronavirus test in a drive-thru testing center outside the hospital in Billings, Montana, March 20
All are doing enough testing per 100,000 residents and are getting less than 10% positive results. Pictured: A drive-thru coronavirus testing site in Springfield, Tennessee, April 18
By comparison, New Jersey is only testing 77 per 100,000 people and New York is testing 115 per 100,000. Pictured: Nurses work at a drive-thru testing site for coronavirus at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, May 6
To calculate their estimates, the Harvard team created a model of future cases for every state.
Next, they determined how much testing needed to be done in each state to test everyone infected by the virus and anyone they had come into contact with.
Testing, of course, depends on the outbreak and states with bigger outbreaks need more widespread testing.
‘Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who’s infected and who’s not,’ Dr Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, told NPR.
‘And that lets you separate out the infected people from the non-infected people and bring the disease under control.’
The nine states all meet, or are nearly meeting, their daily targets of testing however many residents per 100,000.
For example, based on seven-day average, North Dakota is testing 236 per 100,000 people daily – which is more than double its target – and 2.2 percent of its test results are positive.
And Alaska, testing 89 per 100,000 residents, only has 0.4 of all its tests come back positive for COVID-19, according to a graphic put together by NPR.
The nine states’ outbreaks weren’t very large to begin and, with a relatively small population, it doesn’t take as many tests to get to a minimum percentage, but the team says their respective health departments are to be commended.
Meanwhile, New Jersey, which has the second-most number of cases, is only testing 77 per 100,000 residents daily, many times less than is needed.
Additionally, nearly one-third of all its tests – 32.8 percent – come back positive, the NPR graphic says.
New York is only testing about 115 per 100,000 – although it is much closer at 13.8 percent to meeting the 10 percent or lower benchmark.
The findings are surprising as several southern US states including Georgia, Florida and Texas begin to reopen.
While all have less than 10 percent of positive cases, none are testing enough residents per 100,000.
The Harvard team suggests that, across the US, more than 900,000 tests need to be performed per day – nearly double from its original estimate of 500,000 to 600,000 tests done every day.
‘Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying],’ Jha said.
Testing isn’t the only thing states need to be doing. They also need to be doing contact tracing and isolating anyone who is or may be infected.
‘I don’t want anybody to just look at the number and say: ‘We meet it and we’re good to go,’ Jha told NPR.
‘What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers.’
In the US, there more than 1.2 million confirmed cases of the virus and more than 74,000 deaths.
