Testing is an essential component of effective outbreak responses. Without widespread testing, we cannot know whether a disease is spreading nor take measures to appropriately respond to it. “All countries should be able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded, they should know where the cases are, and that is how they can take decisions,” said Dr Tedros, WHO Director General. Health Policy Watch is tracking testing trends in countries around the world, based on data from FIND’s COVID-19 tracker.

We display diagnostic capacity using two measures – cumulative testing by countries and trends showing change  

We have displayed the data using two measures: cumulative number of tests per million population, for all countries administering tests as of 28 March, and trends in selected countries over the past week.

From the cumulative data, we can see how some countries, including Iceland, Bahrain, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and Switzerland, far outpace other nations in terms of their rate of testing, per million people. We also see how many low and middle income countries across Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia still lack any significant test capacity, even while cases are rising.  Importantly, we present testing data per million people to account for large population differences between countries.

From the trends data, we can also see how countries such as Australia, Switzerland and the United States, have very rapidly ramped up testing over just the past week, while others, such as France and Great Britain, lag further behind.

Within the past week, European countries such as Switzerland and the Czech Republic have doubled and tripled their testing capacity, respectively. Switzerland, which has one of the highest per-capita rates of infection in the world, has now administered 12,639 tests per million people. Countries like France and the UK, however, have not reported any changes in testing over the past week, with only 1,548 and 1,779 tests per million , respectively, despite increasingly high infection rates.