by Calculated Risk on 4/18/2020 04:51:00 PM

From CNBC: New York coronavirus deaths top 13,000 but hospitalization continues to drop, Cuomo says

The lack of sufficient supplies of reagents has been cited by labs in the state as the main reason they are not performing the number of tests that they are now otherwise capable of doing with their existing testing machines.

He said that the top labs in New York have told state officials that the shortage of reagents stems from two factors: reagents tend to come from overseas sources, and the federal government has been telling test makers how to distribute their reagent supplies.

The US needs someone in charge of resolving these bottlenecks!

Test-and-trace is a key criterion in starting to reopen the country.   My current guess is test-and-trace will require around 300,000 tests per day at first since the US is far behind the curve.  Some scientists believe we need around 800,000 tests per day.

Note: The Financial Times reports that Germany is doing more than 50,000 tests per day (with about one-fourth of the US population). That would be 200,000 in the US.  I rounded up to 300,000 per day since the US is so behind on testing. But there are recommendations that Germany needs 200,000 tests per day to do test-and-trace.  (800,000 adjusted for population).

This is just test results reported daily.

There were 132,989 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.

The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 20% (red line).  The US probably needs enough tests to push  the percentage below 5% (probably much lower based on testing in New Zealand).

All experts agree: We need many more tests!