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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I took this test this Friday (Quest Direct) in NYC and tested negative.

In late Feb. I had a 'flu like symptoms' with fever and massive headache for few days. What worried me later is that I had the 'can't taste anything' symptom a week later. No coughing though.

If you read online, you see people swear they had it at some point this winter. So, if you had a 'flu like' symptoms in Feb or early March, perhaps it was just that...

It cost $110 and personally I think it was worth it... (it is a reminder myself to be more careful as I can still get it)...

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If the government was serious about homeland security and restoring the economy they would be subsidizing testing full boat.

The government has made it clear that this is about politics and business, not safety or public health.

Not to put too fine a point on it, even if it is about politics and business it's practically crazy not to fully fund these kinds of activities. The ROI is staggering. It's pretty hard to imagine a price tag where it doesn't work out well for you.

When NYC said it would give free meals to anyone with no id check or possibility of being turned down to be refreshing and a solution without politics or hidden agendas.

If it were about business, they would be funding testing.

Knowing who can safely go back to work gets your economy open faster than blindly just flipping the switch like they’re doing now.

I don't know that fully subsidizing testing would necessarily be enough to satisfy demand for testing, but at $100 per test x 300M Americans x call it 1 test per week, you're looking at $30B per week to test everyone every week, if testing really can scale up that far. Which is (extremely) expensive but still less than the current stimulus packages and economic damage.

I actually kinda wonder whether the ROI is high enough that it makes sense for some of the bigger investment funds to subsidize these tests. There are $4T under passive management in the US, so it would cost less than 1% of that number to test every American once at current market prices. If doing so would boost the market by at least 1%, it seems like it would have positive ROI to do so (and I for one would be happy if the index funds I'm invested in did so).

Did you have nasal congestion? If so, that could explain the loss of taste. The olfactory system plays a significant role in taste perception.

> So, if you had a 'flu like' symptoms in Feb or early March, perhaps it was just that

Please do remember that this was apparently a bad flu season before everybody locked down and the flu vaccine was less effective than average.

It was odd, because, anecdotally, in Southern California flu season seemed to be much better than average, but apparently other parts of the country were getting pounded.

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