It doesn’t accomplish anything beyond causing undue chaos. Covid is now part of the larger ecosystem of exciting respiratory viruses you catch every year. Knowing it is Covid specifically and not some other virus doesn’t really give the sick person additional information—for the majority of infections the response will be the same: stay home, get rest, get good sleep, take your vitamins and recover.

All this mass testing is a colossal waste of health resources that doesn’t add any useful information beyond bumping up the case count.

Covid is endemic. Part of learning to live with it is to not test everybody that comes down with flu/cold-like symptoms. We’ve never done this for other respiratory viruses except before prescribing very specific medications like tamiflu.

Efficiently being able to source a test when needed may serve to reduce the load on the medical system.

As of today, if I want a test, my options are

* private seller - hard to source with high demand and expensive for those with limited income

* public test center - availability is a nightmare right now

* medical provider, be it PCP or ER

I don’t personally know how many people are choosing option 3, but anecdotally I have heard from friends and colleagues that they’ve chosen it for when their kids/they are sick.

There’s also an interesting side effect here: every at-home positive is a positive public health authorities won’t know about.

Gaming it out in my head, I would assume that this increases access to testing for those who are either uninsured or those who could not afford the turnaround time for their insurance to reimburse them for purchase of at-home testing.

As such, in this alternate world without the intervention, a chunk of the populace cannot afford to test. If one wanted to make slightly rasher assumptions, this segment might include those who are in jobs (Walmart, food preparation and service) that expose them to a large part of the population.