Test Costs - $60 billion/week. Shipping Costs - $4-5 billion/week. USPS delivers about 180 million letters a day. Their volume would triple![1]
This assumes all of the other problems like 100% participation and zero tech support issues are non-existent.
So, according to your estimates of 2 billion tests per week, that would make for $2 billion per week, not $60 billion per week.
As for shipping, the tests need not be shipped via USPS nor need they be shipped individually to every person.
They might be locally manufactured, there could be centralized distribution locations, and people could stock up for a month's or a year's worth of tests at one time, greatly reducing shipping costs (assuming enough tests could be made, of course).
The tests could also be at the very least targeted at locations where there are a lot of infections, further reducing how many tests would need to be manufactured and used.
This is a no brainer.
Of course that doesn't exist yet, but it would solve all the problems you mention.
The tests could be manufactured locally and picked up in bulk by the end users from centralized locations.
But even if they did have to be mailed to the end users in the hundreds of millions, that's not exactly an insurmountable challenge.
Just a little while ago hundreds of millions of people got mailed ballots and plenty of other information so they could vote in the Presidential Election. That's not to mention all the junk mail each of us gets every single day.
Look at the massive effort put in to the Manhattan Project and the Space Race. There's no reason the government couldn't have done something like that for mass testing, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6510/1409
One cannot be certain why, but perhaps it is due to the fact that the prior qualifications of this individual were:
1. Operating some mixed-use buildings in New York, and casinos in Atlantic City purchased through extensive family loans 2. Owning and operating a few golf courses 3. Licensing their name to some adult learning courses that were later revealed to be scams 4. Being the star of a reality TV show
Without passing any sort of judgement on this person, they were completely unqualified to orchestrate anything anywhere near the complexity of the Manhattan Project or Space Race.
They were unable to even prioritize and orchestrate the allocation of adequate PPE to healthcare facilities, as well as adequate testing capacity for 50% of Americans to be tested on a monthly basis let-alone daily.
Again, no judgement on this individual, but they were totally unprepared and unwilling to manage the crisis and their failure to act likely hamstrung any meaningful attempt to coordinate the type of effort you are describing, which would have required federal buy-in.
Again, according to that TWiV episode, making the tests is not much more complicated than just printing some antibodies on pieces of paper.
It could definitely be done, we just need the will to do it.
A Manhattan Project for testing could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and probably trillions of dollars.