WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th March, 2020) US health services have significantly accelerated coronavirus testing and already checked 370,000 people, almost two thirds of them over the last week, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx told reporters.
"We are continuing to accelerate testing at a record rate. We now have 370,000 tests that have been done," Birx said at a daily briefing Tuesday. "The majority of those, over 220,000, in the last eight days."
The United States is catching up with South Korea, the world leader in coronavirus testing.
"What they did in eight weeks, we did in eight days," Birx said.
Most new cases, around 60 percent of them, are identified in New York metropolitan area where the infection rate, according to experts, reaches one to 1,000 against 0.1-0.2 in Washington State, also hard hit by the disease.
According to the Johns Hopkins University tally, across the United States there are over 53,000 confirmed coronavirus cases which killed 696 people.
