Dr. Anthony Fauci says the U.S. needs to triple its testing for COVID-19 to find out how widespread the virus truly is.

The U.S. has now tested 4,026,572 Americans, according to Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. That’s about 1.2% of the 328 million people in the U.S.

“We’re only doing 1.5 to 2 million a week,” said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “We really need to get up to at least maybe two times that, three times that.”

“We are certainly going to need more,” Fauci said on “Good Morning America.”

The immunologist also said that testing for antibodies to the virus — which may indicate that someone has already had the virus and therefore might be immune, at least for a period of time — might not be the be-all, end-all.

“There really is a lot of misunderstanding about antibody tests,” Fauci said. “It’s saying whether you were exposed, infected, and recovered from that infection. The problem is that these are tests that need to be validated and calibrated… but the problem is a lot of tests don’t do that,” he said.

Numerous tests — none of them yet peer-reviewed and some of them unscientific — show that the number of Americans who have antibodies is higher than the number of confirmed cases.

In a new study, conducted by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, researchers suggest that as many as 442,000 Los Angeles County residents might have already been infected with the coronavirus by early April. In the study of more than 860 adults tested for COVID-19 antibodies in their blood, researchers found 4.1% have the antibodies.

“That translates to roughly 221,000 to 442,000 adults who have recovered from an infection, once margin of error is taken into account, according to the researchers conducting the study,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The estimated infection numbers are 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed COVID-19 cases L.A. County had reported at the time of the study in early April.”

Other reports indicate more Americans than currently known have already had the coronavirus — but showed no symptoms at all. “Based on known cases, health officials have said the virus usually causes mild or moderate flu-like illness,” The Associated Press reported Monday. “Now evidence is growing that a substantial number of people may have no symptoms at all.”

But Fauci said, “We do not know exactly what an antibody title means.”

“There’s a reasonable assumption that when you have an antibody that you are protected against re-infection, but that has not been proven for this particular virus,” he said in his interview.

“But we don’t know how long that protection — if it exists — lasts. Is it one month, three months, six months, a year?” he said. And the doctor said it could still be a while before there is an accurate — and approved — antibody test.

“If you have an antibody test… Unless that test has been validated and you can show there’s a correlation between the antibody and infection, it’s an assumption to say this is something we can work with,” he said. “There’s still a ways to go with that.”

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