How many people each state has tested for coronavirus so far

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 11, 2020 file photo, a technician prepares COVID-19 coronavirus patient samples for testing at a laboratory in New York's Long Island. Wide scale testing is a critical part of tracking and containing infectious diseases. But the U.S. effort has been plagued by a series of missteps, including accuracy problems with the test kits the CDC sent to other labs and bureaucratic hurdles that slowed the entrance of large, private sector labs. (AP Photo/John Minchillo) less FILE - In this Wednesday, March 11, 2020 file photo, a technician prepares COVID-19 coronavirus patient samples for testing at a laboratory in New York's Long Island. Wide scale testing is a critical part of ... more Photo: John Minchillo / Associated Press Photo: John Minchillo / Associated Press Image 1 of / 37 Caption Close How many people each state has tested for coronavirus so far 1 / 37 Back to Gallery

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There’s good news and bad news in the United States’ efforts to test the public for the COVID-19 virus. Testing has gone up dramatically in recent days, but there is still catching up to do — and states aren’t doing it equally.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. had tested 433,545 people for the coronavirus, according to the unofficial COVID Tracking Project, which aggregates available state data. That’s up from only 103,000 people tested six days ago, when much of the country was already sheltering in place.

However, nearly one-quarter of those tests were conducted in one state: New York. By contrast California, with double New York’s population, had reported tested only 27,000 people until Wednesday, when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced 66,800 total had been tested. It was unclear how many of those new tests were still pending.

California largely attributed the spike in testing to "commercial, provider and academic labs that have increased testing capacity and are now reporting that data to the state." The most recent numbers included 2,535 positive cases and 53 deaths.

As recently as Tuesday, President Trump and others had called New York the epicenter of U.S. infections – its nearly 31,000 cases make up almost half of the nation’s positive tests. But with many states lagging far behind it in per capita testing, health experts can only guess what the virus’ national impact really is.

“We have no systematic strategy to do the kind of surveillance necessary to understand the chain of transmission,” Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale School of Medicine, told the Washington Post this week. “We’re basically flying blind because we have so little idea about its penetration into our society and the number of people affected.”

Up to now, coronavirus has been mostly equated with urban, coastal states. But Louisiana is an example of a more rural state that may be facing far more infections as testing ramps up. It reported 1,800 positive cases Wednesday, 400 more than a day earlier.

Sixty-five Louisianans, out of 11,000 tested, have died just two weeks after the state’s first positive test. By contrast, California had reported 40 deaths after almost 28,000 tests before Wednesday.

Reasons why the U.S. fell far behind nations such as South Korea in testing for the virus include faulty tests initially sent by the Centers for Disease Control, and private companies not being tasked with developing their own tests.

Reporting state-by-state testing data is imperfect because each state reports it differently and not all report negative test results. But what follows are the states that have tested the most and least for coronavirus on a total and per-million basis, as March 25 in the afternoon, using the COVID Tracking Project’s data.

New York: 103,479 tests (5,322 per 1M)

California: 66,800 tests (1,672 per 1M)

Washington: 34,181 tests (4,383 per 1M)

Florida: 18,289 tests (831 per 1M)

Ohio: 14,764 tests (1,256 per 1M)

Massachusetts: 13,749 tests (1,970 per 1M)

Texas: 13,494 tests (457 per 1M)

Pennsylvania: 12,320 tests (961 per 1M)

New Jersey: 12,045 tests (1,347 per 1M)

Illinois: 11,485 (907 per 1M)

Minnesota: 11,475 tests (2,012 per 1M)

Louisiana: 11,451 tests (2,465 per 1M)

Tennessee: 11,184 tests (1,621 per 1M)

North Carolina: 10,489 tests (988 per 1M)

Wisconsin: 8,694 tests (1,485 per 1M)

Colorado: 7,701 tests (1,317 per 1M)

New Mexico: 6,842 (3,263 per 1M)

Georgia: 6,179 tests (575 per 1M)

Utah: 5,823 tests (1,774 per 1M)

Virginia: 5,370 tests (622 per 1M)

Connecticut: 5,300 tests (1,487 per 1M)

Nevada: 4,572 tests (1,456 per 1M)

Oregon: 4,559 tests (1,059 per 1M)

Michigan: 3,860 tests (384 per 1M)

Hawaii: 3,666 tests (2,595 per 1M)

Indiana: 3,356 tests (497 per 1M)

Maine: 3,326 tests (2,471 per 1M)

Kentucky: 3,022 tests (671 per 1M)

Alabama: 2,812 tests (572 per 1M)

Iowa: 2,723 tests (856 per 1M)

New Hampshire: 2,530 tests (1,845 per 1M)

South Carolina: 2,470 tests (474 per 1M)

Kansas: 2,184 tests (750 tests per 1M)

Montana: 2,001 tests (1,841 per 1M)

Idaho: 1,960 tests (1,073 per 1M)

Mississippi: 1,943 tests (649 per 1M)

North Dakota: 1,773 tests (2,327 per 1M)

Alaska: 1,733 tests (2,361 per 1M)

Vermont: 1,712 tests (2,725 per 1M)

District of Columbia: 1,609 tests (2,232 per 1M)

Rhode Island: 1,463 tests (1,385 per 1M)

Nebraska: 1,365 tests (699 per 1M)

Arkansas: 1,286 tests (423 per 1M)

South Dakota: 1,128 tests (1,249 per 1M)

Oklahoma: 969 tests (245 per 1M)

Wyoming: 930 tests (1,640 per 1M)

West Virginia: 804 tests (452 per 1M)

Arizona: 736 tests (99.7 per 1M)

Missouri: 624 tests (101 per 1M)

Maryland: 517 tests (84.9 per 1M)

Delaware: 151 tests (153 per 1M)

Greg Keraghosian is an SFGATE homepage editor. Email: greg.keraghosian@sfgate.com