President Donald Trump was flanked with banners Monday celebrating that the United States being the top in the world in testing. One of the problems that Trump's White House seems to be ignoring is that the United States also has among the largest populations in the world. There are countries that simply can't test as much as the United States because they only have a few million people living in their country.
What can be compared, however, is the percentage of the citizenry being tested in any given country.
Trump cited Germany as doing an overwhelming amount of testing. The country is "up there" with the United States he said. Germany has so many test kits they are telling students to test themselves every four days.
Admiral Brett Giroir, M.D explained that the United States has done twice as much tested as South Korea. The United States has 330 million citizens when South Korea has a population of just 51.64 million.
Trump also explained that the U.S. is testing an average of 300,000 people per day, but White House officials said that there were 1.9 million tests last week. That calculates out to just 271,000 tests per day.
Their own chart reveals that the U.S. doesn't lead the world in testing. Denmark does.
Harvard University published a study saying that if the United States really wants to take testing seriously, they need to get closer to testing tens of millions of Americans per day.
As one former White House correspondent pointed out, the numbers Trump is touting are almost impossible to prove.
