by Calculated Risk on 8/18/2020 06:04:00 PM

The US is now mostly reporting over 700,000 tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, the percent positive needs to be well under 5% to really push down new infections, so the US still needs to increase the number of tests per day significantly (or take actions to push down the number of new infections).

There were 642,814 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 40,458 positive tests.

There have been 18,184 COVID deaths in the first 18 days of August. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here.

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.

The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 6.3% (red line).

For the status of contact tracing by state, check out testandtrace.com.

And check out COVID Exit Strategy to see how each state is doing.