People waiting to take a test for the new coronavirus at a health center in Seoul on Tuesday.
Photo: Choi Jae-gu/Associated PressWASHINGTON—The Trump administration in recent days has repeatedly hailed the fact that the U.S. is outpacing South Korea in per capita coronavirus testing. Experts say that comparison tells only part of the story.
“For weeks, the media cited South Korea for being the gold standard for testing,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday. “As it stands, we are now testing at a higher rate per capita than South Korea.”
Her comments echoed those of President Trump in a press briefing on testing a day earlier and an accompanying fact sheet the White House released Monday.
After initially lagging behind South Korea, whose population is less than a fifth of the U.S.’s, the U.S. has indeed surpassed the country in per capita testing. But experts say the reason South Korea has been hailed for its testing model isn’t just for its implementation of widespread testing—but for how quickly it got such a system into place.
“The timing is very different” between the two countries, said Xi Chen, an assistant professor of health policy and economics at the Yale School of Public Health. “In South Korea, they did [widespread testing] much earlier after they had the first patient. The U.S. was delayed for more than a month.”
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A senior administration official said the White House has highlighted the comparison to South Korea “not necessarily because it is the most analogous to the U.S.” but because “it is the standard everyone was holding us to a month or two ago.” The official said a variety of factors affected the timing of the U.S.’s testing capacity compared with that of South Korea. Those include the different nature of the countries’ outbreaks and health-care systems as well as the broad powers the South Korean government gave itself in tracking down the virus and isolating infected individuals.
“We’re at a point now where testing is a good success story for this administration,” the official said.
South Korea approved its first test kit on Feb. 4, when the country had reported just 16 cases. It began distributing them within days and soon began testing tens of thousands of people a day, using drive-through clinics and pop-up facilities—and an army of more than 1,000 medical professionals.
By mid-March, South Korea had tested more than a quarter-million people. The U.S. by that point had tested less than 60,000 people.
South Korea has since been able to stem the spread of the new coronavirus, though its case count has begun to tick up again after it eased restrictions last week. The number of new cases in the U.S. has trended downward but is still in the tens of thousands.
While it has outpaced South Korea, the U.S. continues to trail some other countries, including Iceland, on per capita testing. Iceland has a population of fewer than 400,000.
The U.S. also lags behind more than a dozen other countries in the number of tests per confirmed case, an indicator of a country’s scale of testing. The U.S. conducts around seven tests per confirmed case, compared with 171.8 in New Zealand and 24.9 in India, according to an analysis by Our World in Data, a nonprofit scientific effort based at the University of Oxford.
Public-health experts say that anywhere between 3.5 million and tens of millions of tests a week are necessary to reopen the country safely. Mr. Trump said Monday the U.S. is now conducting 300,000 tests a day, or just over 2 million a week.
A senior administration official said the White House believes it has enough tests available now to reopen parts of the country in accordance with federal guidelines. “There are ways to make it work,” the official said. Another official said it was more a question of who was being tested than how many people. “With the volume we have, it’s enough to strategically test,” the official said.
Adm. Brett Giroir, who is heading up the administration’s testing efforts, said at a Senate hearing Tuesday that the nation should be capable of conducting 40 to 50 million tests a month by September. Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump said that the U.S. would be able to test five million people a day—or roughly 150 million people a month—“very soon.”
Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com
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