[makomk]

The US is doing a significant amount of testing compared to what's available almost anywhere else on the planet. I think Germany is still beating them, but they're basically the only large country that is at this point. Journalists here in the UK have actually been pointing to the US as one of the examples that proves we're the ones failing at testing for a while now.

[microtherion]

It depends on where you draw the line for "large", but the US is really not doing all that great (though it has caught up significantly over the last month): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Drawing the line at ~5M inhabitants, the following countries/territories have conducted more tests per million population than the US: The UAE, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Hong Kong, Australia, Spain, New Zealand, Israel, Czechia, Singapore, Canada, Belgium, South Korea, and Russia.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

The U.S. has more resources per capita at its disposal, but if everyone is starting at zero tests, I'd still expect smaller countries to be able to ramp faster relative to their population, and all the countries you've listed are indeed smaller than the U.S.

There's the old adage "nine women can't make a baby in a month". Sometimes there are real-world limits to scaling, and the U.S. does have an incredible amount of tests to create.

[makomk]

Yeah. One big reason I'm not counting small countries (that is, anyone much smaller than Germany) is that there's a limited global supply of pretty much every consumable you need to test for coronavirus, and smaller wealthy countries can get a major boost in per-capita testing by just buying up more of the supply. So there's a whole bunch of smaller countries with really substantial per-capita testing advantages over all the larger ones.

[microtherion]

I'm not expecting the US to rise to the lofty levels of the Faeroe Islands, but it seems to me that you're grading on an excessively lenient curve here. Germany is the 19th most populous country in the world, and of the top 19, only 3 are bona fide first world countries (the US, Japan, and Germany) , and even one of the marginal candidates (Russia) is beating the US in tests.

And it's not like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or the Czech Republic are particularly small or particularly wealthy.

[rovolo]

Where are you getting that data? The 'Our World in Data' site says reporting is inconsistent, but the data they do have shows per-capita Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Austria doing more than the US, and France, the UK, and the Netherlands doing less.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-cumulative-tota...

(I'm using cumulative because the daily numbers are missing for Germany, France, and the Netherlands)

[makomk]

It's certainly possible other countries have passed the US since I last looked, the exact leaderboard does seem to vary depending on things like which country is hitting the biggest roadblocks in their test rollout right now. (Though Italy's lead in total per-capita tests is mainly because they were the first Western country to have their outbreak hit catastrophic levels and they ramped up testing fairly aggressively early on in response to that. I presume their testing wasn't so great prior to the collapse of their healthcare system, since they went from reporting only three cases to disaster alarmingly quickly.)

[rovolo]

Are you using some metric other than "per-capita" for tests? I could understand something like "per-positive case", but it's unclear from your comments.

I ask because the data I have shows the US solidly in the middle for the big EU countries over the past month (Germany and France don't show up on the daily graphs)

- Italy started earliest, but the daily per-capita tests have been higher every day except Apr 4: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...

- Austria, Czechia, and Portugal have been higher than the US more often than not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...

- Belgium is on par; the UK & the Netherlands are definitely worse: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...