The idea that failing to get <5% positive test rate shows that a state has failed to ramp up testing is an... interesting one. It seems to have come from South

The idea that failing to get <5% positive test rate shows that a state has failed to ramp up testing is an... interesting one. It seems to have come from South Korea's goal of 5% positive tests, except their target was about decreasing the total number of cases via partial lockdown rather than increasing the number of tests. However, since that doesn't work so well for the narrative that the lockdown was the result of incompetent Republicans failing at testing, publications like the New York Times instead pushed the claim that the US needed to ramp up testing in order to reach this and catch up with South Korea. (This is almost certainly a stupid idea - trying to play catch-up with exponential growth is pretty futile, and it makes absolutely no sense to use the same target for a lagging measure of a growing epidemic as for a shrinking one. It worked great for stretching out the narrative that the US was behind South Korea in coronavirus testing well beyond the point it was actually true those.)