Although this may sound like an ad for standardized test scores, it is presumably referring COVID-19 coronavirus testing, claiming that the U.S. is leading the world in such efforts.
In fact, last week, a Last Week Tonight with John Oliver episode focused on America’s testing woes, indicating how a lack of testing forced our country to use more aggressive social distancing such as stay-at-home orders than other countries such as South Korea, Singapore, Germany, and Taiwan:
As Oliver pointed out in the video, in late April, the U.S. was performing around 200,000 COVID-19 coronavirus tests a day, which was still far below the recommended 500,000 to 35 million tests per day rates that have been recommended by different public health experts.
He focused on the total number of COVID-19 tests that have been performed and the number of different types of COVID-19 tests that are currently on the market in the U.S., saying that the U.S. is leading the world in both.
Even though a number of different COVID-19 coronavirus tests may be on the market, it’s not yet completely clear how accurate each of these tests may be or how many of the tests cross the threshold of being reasonably accurate.
A low specificity would mean that many people will get positive tests when they aren’t actually infected.
