Tracing Test Capacity in Latin America During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While the COVID-19 pandemic produced massive infection outbreaks and high death tolls, test capacity, an aspect of state capacity for monitoring the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks and providing a foundation for policy elaboration, remains underexplored. The main challenge for examining test capacity is the fact that test performances in official governmental sources are flawed due to the state’s incapacity to supply accurate information. Against this backdrop, I propose alternative measurements for test capacity limitations by using the daily survey data collected via Facebook for 18 Latin American countries from June to December 2020. The survey enables us to fathom test capacity weaknesses by counting the number of people wanted but not tested, which is consistent during the sample period in each of Latin American countries but varied across them. I utilize this measurement that addresses the demand-supply gap in test services to examine the infection report underestimation and case fatality rate. Using fuzzy-set QCA, the alternative measurements proposed by this study reveal that test capacity limitations can provide a broader explanation of the mortality rate beyond the generic, off-the-shelf indicators that most studies have used.