A lab technician emails and reminds of the important efforts that are taking place behind the scenes.
I work in a medical testing lab and have been involved in reporting out COVID lab results. From my experience, the negative result to positive result ratio is roughly between 5:1 to 10:1. Only the positives are being reported to public health agencies, and that’s what eventually makes its way to the Hopkins page and other pages.
As an aside, there is probably a 2-to-3-day delay in what happens in the lab, and what shows up on the internet. The latest numbers of new cases reported in the US for today are about 8,000. So this probably represents 40,000 to 80,000 new test results reported in a day. If you understand the work involved to produce a single test result, that is an astounding amount of test results for a test that no clinical labs had just one month ago.
The point is that the private sector industry has done an amazing job responding to this demand in a short amount of time. They are doing much better than any government effort could muster.