Disease experts say that to pinpoint people who spread COVID-19, testing should be uniform from state to state. It's anything but.
Over the entire month of March, while testing at among the lowest rates in the country, Oklahoma officials identified 565 cases of coronavirus.
Oklahoma’s experience highlights some fundamental facts to emerge from last week’s surge in coronavirus testing nationally: more testing makes a huge difference; the advent of more test kits has failed to eliminate the wide gap between some states and others; and even counting tests consistently is tough to do.
Ranking which states have the worst rates is hard because some are not consistently reporting every time they get a negative result. That means the public has an incomplete picture of how many people have been tested overall. Tests in those states also are far more likely to come back positive than in much of the country, suggesting that testing is occurring there largely in response to people showing up at healthcare providers with symptoms.
Another impediment: the remoteness of much of Oklahoma’s population. About a third of the state’s residents live in rural areas.
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