The U.S. has more resources per capita at its disposal, but if everyone is starting at zero tests, I'd still expect smaller countries to be able to ramp faster relative to their population, and all the countries you've listed are indeed smaller than the U.S.

There's the old adage "nine women can't make a baby in a month". Sometimes there are real-world limits to scaling, and the U.S. does have an incredible amount of tests to create.

Yeah. One big reason I'm not counting small countries (that is, anyone much smaller than Germany) is that there's a limited global supply of pretty much every consumable you need to test for coronavirus, and smaller wealthy countries can get a major boost in per-capita testing by just buying up more of the supply. So there's a whole bunch of smaller countries with really substantial per-capita testing advantages over all the larger ones.

I'm not expecting the US to rise to the lofty levels of the Faeroe Islands, but it seems to me that you're grading on an excessively lenient curve here. Germany is the 19th most populous country in the world, and of the top 19, only 3 are bona fide first world countries (the US, Japan, and Germany) , and even one of the marginal candidates (Russia) is beating the US in tests.

And it's not like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or the Czech Republic are particularly small or particularly wealthy.