If we don’t test, that means doing nothing about it at all, letting it spread unrestricted. If everyone with serious symptoms got good care, we’re talking about 2 million dead. But, of course, a lot of Americans don’t have access to good care on a good day. Since the healthcare system will be massively overwhelmed, only a small percentage will get good care. So you’re talking about something like 5-10 million dead — in the course of months.

I don’t think it would get quite that far, though, because once people start literally dying in the streets, people will be afraid and massively self-quarantine. So... maybe four million dead and the economy completely shuts down anyway.

Really, the quicker and more aggressively we jump on this, the less the damage, both in terms of human life and economic impact.

We’re too late to have a small impact. We’ll feel this for years. Let’s at least try to make something we’ll forget in a generation. Let’s especially make sure we don’t have something they’ll be talking about hundreds of years from now.

I don't agree. The lack of testing means everyone is looking at everyone else as if they are carrying the plague. We're awfully close to full panic as it is. If we could implement wide scale testing with aggressive containment, people who aren't infected could pretty quickly get back to a mostly normal lifestyle.

It is much, much more comforting to have a plan than just hunkering down and waiting your turn to find out if you will live or die.

The more testing, the more you can control the transmission rate. This is all about the transmission rate (you may have heard "flatten the curve" several hundred times recently). Quarantines are a sucky but effective way to reduce the transmission rate. But with testing, isolation can be reduced, which is necessary because quarantines will only be tolerated for so long in Western nations.