Gov. Andrew Cuomo: New York just boosted its total number of coronavirus tests by almost 50% in the past day. Here's how the state is doing compared to other countries.

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference on Friday addressing the coronavirus outbreak.

• He announced that the state had processed 10,000 new coronavirus tests overnight and said the state was now testing at a higher per-capita rate than South Korea or China.

• While the 10,000 test results in the past day represent a very impressive rate, the state has a long way to go to catch up to the overall testing levels of many hard-hit countries.

• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference on Friday addressing the coronavirus outbreak in New York state and elsewhere.

Cuomo announced 7,845 confirmed cases in the state, according to The New York Times, and that 10,000 new coronavirus tests were processed overnight — bringing the state's total to 32,427 tests. The increase suggests the state has in the past 24 hours completed about one-third of all of its tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, since the emergence of the pandemic nearly 12 weeks ago.

According to The Times, Cuomo also said the state was now testing more people per capita than China or South Korea. Though up-to-date testing figures from China are hard to come by, South Korea tested an additional 9,640 people between March 19 and 20, according to the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That South Korea figure is pretty close to the 10,000 tests done in New York overnight, and since South Korea has about 2 1/2 times the population of New York, Cuomo's claim that the state is testing at a higher per-capita rate than that country is reasonably accurate.

However, New York, along with the US as a whole, has a lot of catching up to do.

Here's the total number of tests done since the beginning of the outbreak in New York, the US, and a handful of other countries, along with the population-adjusted number:

Ruobing Su/Business Insider

While most of the countries on the list regularly update the total number of tests performed on their various health-ministry websites, data for the entirety of China is harder to come by. (The results above are for the Guangdong region of China and came from a World Health Organization report published at the end of February on the conditions in China.)

New York has been ramping up testing pretty dramatically over the past weeks and has tested nearly five times the share of its population compared with the US as a whole. However, there is still a long way to go to match or exceed overall per-capita testing rates in hard-hit countries like China, Italy, and South Korea.

Testing is an important part of any state's or country's response to the outbreak. Being able to track the extent and severity of the disease makes it possible to develop responses and keep as many people safe as possible.

• Read more:

• Coronavirus live updates: More than 265,000 people have been infected and more than 11,100 have died. The US has reported 220 deaths. Here's everything we know.

• New York governor orders all nonessential workers to stay home from work

• A jarring new chart shows America needs to immediately brace itself for historic unemployment

• Nearly 30% of US coronavirus cases have been among people 20-44 years old, the CDC says — showing that young people are getting sick, too

Read the original article on Business Insider