Per capita tests by country
These two charts show the most up-to-date estimates of testing levels that we’ve been able to find. You’ll see that some countries’ data is older than others, meaning that they can’t be directly compared. For instance, the estimate for the province of Guangdong in China has not been updated since 24 February.
The first chart takes the size of the population into account. It plots the total number of tests per million people, against the total number of confirmed cases, also per million people. The higher the dot representing a country is, the more tests per million people it has carried out; the further right it is, the more tests per million people have come back positive.
We see that countries with higher rates of confirmed cases tend to be also countries where a larger share of the total population has been tested. Again, since you can only get a positive test if you carry out a test in the first place, countries that have performed more tests will tend to have more confirmed cases.
But again there are important differences between countries. Vietnam, for example, shows a much higher testing rate than Indonesia, although at this point in time both have a similar number of confirmed cases per million people.
From this perspective, it is clear that the US is lagging behind. The number of tests per million people in the US is almost 10 times lower than in Canada, and about 20 times lower than in South Korea. The US has had big problems rolling out their testing strategy, although they seem to be slowly catching up.
The second chart plots the number of tests per million people, country by country. Not all countries with available data are shown by default – you can select the option ‘+add country’ to see the available estimates for other countries.
Per million people: Tests
conducted vs. Total confirmed
cases of COVID-19
conducted vs. Total confirmed
cases of COVID-19
Total COVID-19 tests
performed per million people
Source: Our World in Data
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