A New York Times reporter followed coronavirus swabs from a New Jersey drive-thru testing site to a lab hundreds of miles away, and it shows why the testing in the US is still slow and limited

Jim Urquhart/Reuters

• Although the US has ramped up its coronavirus testing capacity in recent weeks, the country still lags behind others in testing per capita. 
• According to figures from the COVID Tracking Project, the US has tested just over 2.9 million people as of April 13, or just about one in every 112 people.
• Rukmini Callimachi, a correspondent for The New York Times, followed these tests from the time they are taken by a nurse at a testing facility to the time they are delivered to labs and found a number of roadblocks delaying the diagnostic process. 
• And even as the US continues to improve its testing capabilities, several mistakes were made early on that have stalled the testing process, which the US is still catching up on.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump has recently hailed the United States' advancements in coronavirus testing even as the number of cases in the country continues to mount. 

"The United States has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far!" Trump claimed on March 25. On April 2, Trump repeated this claim, saying that the US was "now conducting well over 100,000 coronavirus tests per day ... which is more than any other country in the world, both in terms of the raw number and also on a per capita basis, the most."

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