Coronavirus: California nearly doubles testing per million residents, now ranks 27th in US

SAN FRANCISCO -- There are big improvements for California on the novel coronavirus testing front. The state nearly doubled its number of processed tests this week per million people compared to last week.

State officials say COVID-19 testing is an important indicator in when the state could reopen.

This week, California has significantly improved its ranking as compared to other states testing for the virus.

"We're making progress for one reason -- we took responsibility and we took initiative," said Gov. Gavin Newsom during a press conference Friday.

An ABC7 News I-TEAM analysis of data from the COVID-19 tracking project and state health departments looked at processed tests for the 50 states and D.C.

The data was updated as of Thursday.

California ranks 27th this week, up from 48th last week and 45th on April 10.

"It's still not good enough, we need to do a lot more," said Newsom.

"We hope to be averaging 25,000 tests a day by the end of this month," he continued.

When standardizing for population differences, Rhode Island ranks first with the most tests processed at nearly 42,000 per 1 million people.

California ranks 27th with just over 12,000 tests processed per 1 million people. That's nearly twice the number of tests processed last week.

Kansas is last with a little over 7,000 tests processed per 1 million people.

For California, progress in testing could lead to progress elsewhere.

"The more we can do in this space, much more than we're currently doing, yes, the quicker then we can start connecting, more green dots in those other indicators," Newsom said.

These are indicators that are ultimately needed for the state to re-open.

For more news coverage on the coronavirus and COVID-19 go to ABC30.com/coronavirus