Coronavirus: British Columbia is testing for Covid-19 faster per head than South Korea, even at its peak
- 3,500 Covid-19 tests are being conducted in the Canadian province daily, the health minister says, a rate that easily exceeds South Korea’s rate per capita
- The tests are being conducted at triple the rate of the rest of Canada
South Korea has been hailed around the world for its vast amount of Covid-19 testing, conducting 20,000 tests per day at the recent height of efforts to fight the disease.
But Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia is now exceeding that peak daily rate on a per capita basis by a wide margin of about 75 per cent.
On the same measure, BC is testing at more than triple the rate of the rest of Canada – and more than five times the daily rate in the US over the past week, even as Canada’s southern neighbour embarks on a huge escalation of testing efforts.
British Columbia’s health minister, Adrian Dix, announced on Tuesday that the province was conducting 3,500 tests per day.
That equates to 690 tests per million people, daily. By comparison, South Korea’s peak daily testing rate amounted to about 392 tests per million. BC has a population of 5.1 million, while South Korea has 51 million people.
