More than 30 states, including Florida and Texas, are not doing enough testing to meet goals to help knock back the coronavirus, according to data reported on by the U.K.'s Daily Mail.
In fact, only 17 states and Washington, D.C., are meeting minimum testing criteria to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, and just four are performing enough tests to suppress the virus.
Currently, a half-million tests a day a being performed nationwide. That is twice the number from early May, but only half the number needed to contain current outbreaks. And 4.3 million a day are needed to get the positive test rate below 3%, according to estimates by the Harvard Global Health Institute, NPR reported.
The 17 states meeting or exceeding the necessary rates are: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The standard sought enough daily testing to obtain 10% or fewer positive results.
New York must test 152 per 100,000 people to meet the standard, and is currently surpassing that by testing 309 per 100,000.
In Florida, where cases are rising, testing should be 663 per 100,000 people. Only 196 per 100,000, however, are getting tested.
The four states that have reached levels that allow for suppression are: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, and Vermont. West Virginia is following closely.
Those states are sparsely populated and did not have large outbreaks to begin with, but health officials still praised their efforts.
"What we all really want is to suppress the virus, to get the virus level so low that we don't have large numbers of people getting sick and dying and that we can open up our economy," Harvard Global Health Institute director Dr. Ashish Jha said in a press release.
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