Wasn’t there a $1 test being proposed?
You can start by testing people with high temperature at the entrance of buildings and metro.
Still cheaper that closing schools and all the rest of the economy.
Proposed, yes, but you can't buy it yet. Also, the cheaper tests so far are all antibody tests, not the more accurate RNA tests that everyone is clamoring for. Antibody tests don't work until you have had the infection for a while.
And they are even worse at telling you when you're "all clear" (if they can do it at all, many antibody tests are a "once positive, always positive" deal).
According to Raoult, it doesn’t seem to be a technical limitation, the test is a standard procedure that labs around the country already do routinely for other viruses.
It's the capacity that is the issue. Testing labs all over the world, are running far above capacity already. It's not something that can be scaled up overnight either.
South Korea managed to spin a system where they can test 20k people a day in just over two weeks[1]. What's stopping other countries from doing that?