Bad News: The Positive Share of COVID-19 Tests Has Passed 5 Percent in the United States

How are the rich countries of Europe and North American doing on the coronavirus? This is surprisingly hard to answer. You can look at cases, but they depend a lot on how much testing you’ve done. What’s more, cases don’t seem to correlate very well with deaths anymore.

So how about deaths? That’s better, but still far from perfect since there’s an increasingly open dispute about what counts as a “COVID-19 death.” Plus, deaths are a lagging indicator, as they’ve always been.

So how about share of positive tests? This is the percentage of all COVID-19 tests that come back positive, and epidemiologists say that it needs to be below 5 percent before you can tentatively say you have things under control. During the initial April outbreak, the positive test rate was as high as 20-25 percent in some countries (it peaked at about 18 percent in the US). Here’s what it looks like today:

Needless to say, this is not a perfect metric either. If you test only people who are already showing symptoms, you’ll have a high rate. If you test everyone in a city, you’ll probably have a low rate. However, most countries are testing at a rate of 1-2 per thousand people, with a few outliers above and below that, which makes the positive test rate a decent look at how things are shaping up.

The chart above shows that a few countries are in terrible shape and should probably be locking down everything in sight. Another group of countries is in OK shape but obviously on the rise. And then there’s good old Germany, with a low positivity rate and a fairly flat curve.

The United States doesn’t look good on this metric. We’ve been on the rise for the past two weeks and we broke the 5 percent barrier a few days ago. Winter is coming.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate