So far the United States has tested only about 500 people for the coronavirus. That’s why the number of confirmed cases is so low.
But U.S. testing capacity is rising quickly. Which is why the number of confirmed cases is climbing. And why it is about to spike.
The virus does indeed appear to be spreading but the next spike in reported coronavirus cases will be predominately a result of an increase in the number of people tested.
As such the timing of the next spike in coronavirus cases in the United States–which will scare the financial markets–is relatively predictable.
I say relatively because the information coming out of the Trump administration on the roll out of new tests and new testing capacity has been so frustratingly vague and contradictory.
On Sunday, March 1, Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading or coordinating or something the administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, said 15,000 test kits had been sent out over the weekend. With each kit able to perform 800 tests, that amounts to the capacity to reform 12 million tests. Maybe that’s why Senator Lindsey Graham came out of a briefing for members of Congress by administration officials talking about testing 1 million Americans. However, other administration officials and outside experts such as Scott Gottlieb, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have said that by the end of this week public health labs will be able to test 10,000 samples a day with an additional 10,000 samples a day being tested by academic labs. That’s roughly 100,000 to 150,000 samples tested a week (depending on whether labs work 5 or 7 days.)
There’s quite a difference between 12 million tests (over some unspecified period) and 150,000 tests a week. Obviously.
But either figure would be a huge increase over the 500 tests that had been performed as of March 3.
What you don’t look for, you don’t find. But clearly the United States is about to start looking a lot harder to find cases of the coronavirus.
As of March 4, the total number of confirmed cases in the United States had climbed to 158, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll stood at 11.
With more testing–20,000 a day or 1 million over some time period or whatever–the number of confirmed cases is likely to rise rapidly. There’s a lag between when a test kit becomes available in a lab and when the lab can put it to use. So, as a rough guess, we can look for that spike in reported cases over the next week or two.
And I’d expect that spike in U.S. cases–as a result of an increase in testing–will make financial markets in the United States very, very nervous. (I’d note that many on Wall Street are currently hoping/expecting that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates again at its March 18 meeting.)
