-If the person gets sicker later, you don't have to wait on another test to know the diagnosis and start treatment.
-Second is from a contact tracing perspective and isolation perspective. If this person is positive, it is that much more important that they limit contact with people.
-Third is if you are positive you can donate your plasma which *may help others (good randomized controlled trials for convalescent plasma are still pending).
-If you are positive you make not need the vaccine later, it also could reduce your risk potentially for being infected later, less stress.
-Also helps population wide to know total number of infected to get an idea of rate of spread, herd immunity, other metrics.
You can't optimize only to stop viral spread. You have to strike some balance between maintaining normalcy and reducing the risk of spread.
Covid has killed a million, and will surely kill many more, but global poverty is going to increase this year for the first time in decades, and tens of millions are going go hungry.
The advice of not going to a store if you're sick with something that resembles Covid? Is that such a large number of people it will have a big cost?
One person told me she was cleaning something with vinegar, her daughter entered the kitchen and told her "mum, this vinegar smell is horrible!" and then it dawned on her she couldn't smell anything.
No runny or stuffy nose. She was normal, except she couldn't smell anything.
At this point of the pandemic, complete loss of smell and taste of this kind almost certainly indicates covid19, outliers notwithstanding.
I don't know if most people experience anosmia like you describe while having a common cold or the flu, though (I think they don't). From what I've read this symptom is a pretty reliable indicator of covid19, so much so that at this time it pretty much rules out any other diagnosis and it is a strong basis for medical decision making. (Of course, there will always be outliers for any symptom. Decisions still need to be made at the population scale, though).
Let's be clear about what we want. It sounds like you want people to spend money, not primarily that you want them to enter shops and breathe air and touch things.
For most people, going to the doctor is more bother than it's worth and half the time they'll tell you that you don't qualify for whatever test or treatment you were hoping to receive anyway.
There is a massive disconnect between how many people are testing positive and how many people are actually infected, and it's skewing everyone's perception of the virus.