I don't know if this is still true but according to an article I read a few days ago, the US has the lowest testing rate of any affected country. Experiences of other countries seem to suggest that high testing rate may mitigate the need for measures like lockdowns.

By an order of magnitude: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-testing-covid-19...

That's misleading. The Feds state that they've sent several hundred thousand tests to private labs and hospitals which do not report their figures directly to CDC. They don't know how many have been used at this point (which is bad, but not as bad as them not sending out hundreds of thousands of tests).

"Earlier on Tuesday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he couldn’t provide the figure. “We don’t know exactly how many because hundreds of thousands of our tests have gone out to private labs and hospitals that currently do not report in to CDC,” he said in a CNN appearance."

https://news.yahoo.com/only-5000-americans-have-been-tested-...

Seems like a lame argument, they are the CDC why can't they simply ask the labs to report back the findings its a global pandemic for goodness sake.

Not saying this as an defense to your observation, but it's possible that they just don't have the capacity to manage that information, given the disparate nature of our health care system. Others have pointed out that the entire pandemic response org chain was fired a while back under the premise of cost savings.

Communicating that information back in a secure, consistent, and reliable way requires a "system" of some kind. It could be a secure website or even a phone war room ready to go and staffed with operators waiting for the test reports.

If such a system was available, you'd think they'd use it in heartbeat, which kind of implies it doesn't exist.

And it's not like systems of this sort - or more even more complex - don't exist. When my kids were born, we donated the umbilical cord blood to a stem cell bank. The organization sent me special bar-coded packaging with a refrigerated pack to be overnight posted back to them.

As of 4pm ET today https://twitter.com/covid19tracking (aggregating known state testing results) shows about 5100 tests performed, or 15 tests per million people.

CDC also stopped reporting number of tests each day (last week iirc).

Those are total NY numbers, right? considering recent article about "Washington state authorities sent an urgent request for 233,000 respirators .. to be released from the federal", not to mention the fact Italy has 30K, and they ran out a week ago.

Well, that's only the constraint because the FDA disallows importing foreign kits, and has prevented private companies from manufacturing them, no?

So in a sense, the obstacle is (deliberately?) awful policy.