This is a scenario where the government at some level needs to pick up the tab.
Agreed. Government needs to foot the bill for testing. Anything that prevents a sick person from getting tested increases the spread rate of the disease.
So
there is to be a charge, it's just that you don't think you should be the one that pays it.
It will bounce back. The world is in lockdown for a while. That's not panicking, just smart.
While the precautions all of the countries taken can be seen as overblown (my synagogue canceled services for the first time ever), I'd rather have there be something done, than have nothing done at all and people pretending this is nothing at all.
Not only is it smart, it's realistic. At the best of times, we can afford to live in a consensual delusion. Right now, we cannot.
To put it bluntly, **** just got real.
Doing nothing
can be better than doing something, but it is a false dichotomy.
I understand that many of you are scared, and you sound scared on this forum. I want to provide you with a reality check for a moment.
You're probably going to get coronavirus.
This is an illness that does not kill most of the people that get it. By illness standards, it is no bubonic plague, smallpox, or polio. Most people have mild symptoms and recover. You know your body pretty well, and you know whether or not you have underlying issues or other factors that should make you take extreme precautions to avoid contracting this disease, and it will take extreme precautions if you
need to avoid contracting it. Be realistic about whether or not that's you.
You're probably not going to be hospitalized by this. Again, you know your body and whether you have underlying issues that could cause hospitalization. And you should take extreme precautions if you
need to avoid contracting it because you'll be hospitalized. For most of you, that is not the case. Most of you will handle this one in bed at home.
What we are doing right now is not smart. It's stupid. It's literally the easiest, dumbest thing we can think of to combat the disease. A 4-year old can come up with the plan that people should just not have contact with each other to avoid getting it. That's not hard to do. The only thing stupider than the kind of lockdown that we're doing is to do absolutely nothing, not take it seriously, and let our seniors and other vulnerable members of our society die in triage.
There are other options of course. We should be focusing on quarantining the vulnerable. We should be more efficiently expanding our healthcare bandwidth. We should be
enabling people rather than
disabling them.
As a result of our lack of creativity and forward thinking, some of you will probably lose your jobs. Many of you will need to stress about savings that you had already thought you took care of. As a result of our uninspired lack of problem solving, many of you will panic buy, or wonder whether you can get the needed supplies when you get sick - because everyone is going to stock up for months at home in isolation, unnecessarily.
You're not as likely to see the financial carnage. It's going to be harder to see the increased taxes, the lost wages, the products that never made it to market, the businesses that collapsed. But they're real, and they're going to have a bigger impact on most of you than a few days in bed would have.
Denver Public schools closed yesterday. That's going to cost some people their jobs.
That is what our local news (abc13) showed. 
