by Calculated Risk on 8/27/2020 07:42:00 PM

IMPORTANT: The CDC has changed their guidance on who should be tested - at the direction of the White House - over the objections of scientists. This action is clearly intended to make the numbers look better over the next couple of months. See: Controversial change in guidelines about coronavirus testing directed by the White House coronavirus task force

The CDC estimates that 40 percent of those who test positive for the coronavirus have no symptoms but may be highly infectious and spread it to other people.

These are the people the White House doesn't want to test. Testing, tracing and transparency are keys to suppressing the virus.  This change in guidance is counterproductive.

The US is now mostly reporting over 700,000 tests per day (fewer recently). 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 742,340 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 44,264 positive tests.

There have been over 27,000 COVID reported deaths in the first 27 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 6.0% (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.