Fact check: Trump claims U.S. testing for coronavirus most per capita — it’s not

Testing in the U.S. still lags behind Germany and South Korea

• By Barbara Sprunt and Domenico Montanaro/NPR

During his Thursday night briefing with the coronavirus task force, President Trump repeated a claim that the United States has done more testing for the contagion on a per-capita basis than any other country.

“We’re now conducting well over 100,000 coronavirus tests per day,” Trump said. “It’s over 100,000 tests a day. And these are accurate tests, and they’re moving rapidly, which is more than any other country in the world, both in terms of the raw number and also on a per-capita basis, the most.”

While the United States has improved its testing numbers significantly, it still lags behind Germany and South Korea, for example, in terms of per-capita testing.

During Wednesday’s briefing, Vice President Pence said more than 1.2 million tests have been performed on Americans. Given the population of the U.S. (about 327 million), that’s roughly one in every 273 people, as of April 2.

That’s a better testing per-capita rate than the United Kingdom, which has tested about one in every 404 people. (The U.K.’s population is about 66 million, and it’s tested 163,194 people.)

South Korea, with its population of 51.5 million, has done 431,743 tests, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s approximately one in every 119 people.

Germany has done even better. It has tested about one-in-90 people — 918,460 with a population of 82.8 million. Germany also happens to have one of the lowest fatality rates from COVID-19.

With 581,232 tests conducted, according to the Italian health ministry, and a population of roughly 60.5 million, Italy’s testing per capita is on par with South Korea — about one in every 104.