Living in Germany with a neighbor working in intensive care on COVID-19 patients: Germany was one of the first nations to come up with a test and usually, the lab they're working with has a 4h turnaround time, but the backlog is currently 3 days. As said, results vary widely depending on where you are, but on average, Germany's still testing more people here than most other nations other than maybe China or South Korea. I suspect that's the main reason behind the huge discrepancies of deaths per case in Germany vs. South Europe: Germany may not be particularly thorough, but the number of unreported cases is certain to be higher almost anywhere else. Especially the US will have a really rough wakeup call.

Most stuff related to the pandemic like testing is not centrally organized in Germany, this is all on the state or local level. So I can easily imagine that there are very large differences depending on where exactly you are.

It still looks like a lot of testing is still not being done. 2 of my friends (here in Germany) most likely had it (as attested by their doctor), but were told they would not be tested as they could not with certainty say that they had contact with someone that was tested positive.

The test in the lab actually only takes a couple of hours. Most labs are currently struggling with a backlog.

The test is a simple polymerase chain reaction (PCR), however, the number of PCRs that some labs have to perform has increased by an order of magnitude. The utilization of the required machines and the number of qualified lab scientists are now bottlenecks. This is why tests results often take a couple of days now.

We should see faster lab results in the coming weeks as labs are equipped with more machines and staff is retrained. However, this is also of course dependent on the increase of tests.

In Canada it used to be 24hrs, but there is now a 4-5 day waiting period to get results after you get swabbed or blood tested, due to a large backlog of tests.

So most results we see today are about ~9-10 days old if we combine that with “when did first symptoms appear?” survey in the Chinese study (results were often 5-10 days before visiting the hospital when the tests are first initiated). Then on top of that some people take up to 5 days to show the first symptom.

So any data you see today could easily be 2 weeks old. 1 week would be an ideal target in the short term, depending on where your goalposts are...

That's why the best rule for ingesting news about current events is usually: don't read the comments

It really depends… tests in my city are 1-2 days right now I think, but priority cases like doctors will take the front of the queue and can happen all the time. Colleague of mine was tested and diagnosed (negative) within 4 hours, because her partner is a emergency doctor.

No. My colleague was tested on Wednesday, still no result.