by Calculated Risk on 9/17/2020 06:44:00 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 776,769 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 43,558 positive tests.

Over 14,000 Americans have died from COVID so far in September. 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 5.9% (red line).  NOTE: The percent positive is a seven day average on the graph.

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.

The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported.

The dashed line is the June low.

Note that there were very few tests available in March and April, and many cases were missed (the percent positive was very high - see first graph). By June, the percent positive had dropped below 5%.

If people stay vigilant, the number of cases might drop to the June low by the end of September - although this seems unlikely now (that would still be a large number of new cases, but progress).