If it were subsidized by the Government, they'd be charging 10x that per test.

And could we manufacture 10 billion of them a month?

Yes, it could be done.

According to that TWiV episode (which, again, I encourage everyone to listen to) the tests are very simple: just a piece of paper with some antibodies on it.

As for the $10 billion per month cost, from the TWiV episode (about 31 minutes in):

It just boggles my mind, the enormity of this problem. This is killing enormous numbers of people every day. It's costing the country trillions -- literally trillions of dollars. This should just be part of the national emergency.

It's one thing to make vaccines, it's one thing to make therapeutics, but these are things that necessarily take time. We have to wait to see what the efficacy is, we have to... it's really hard to make therapeutics. A diagnostic test should be a no-brainer. Make a $1 test. Get it to everyone. Change the way we view these things, and that should be completely being plowed through by the federal government.

We don't have to make 300 million of them overnight. We just have to focus them at the moment in places where the cases are worst... it's just astounding that we don't see a flurry of activity from the US Army...

I don't know who makes it, but take every manufacturing company that knows how to print paper, adapt their tools to print monocolonal antibodies on to those sheets and just start slicing it up and shipping it out. It's as easy as that.. well, you know, I'm simplifying it a bit but...

Given that it will be at least 6-9 months before an appreciable fraction of the population can be vaccinated, frequent testing still makes a whole lot of sense.

As to the effort/expense, you'd think we'd be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, no?

What makes you think we can ramp up production on these faster than that? You'd need a billion of them to test each America once every three months.

>As to the effort/expense, you'd think we'd be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, no?

Only if the resources used were entirely unrelated, which I doubt. Every public health offical's man-hour should be dedicated to setting up vaccination sites. Every medical manufacturing facility should be making vaccine components and accessories.

I very much doubt you could set up mass testing of asymptomatic people without making trade offs regarding resources for mass vaccinations.

Those people, at the very least, should be getting tested.

Also, it's going to take a long time for even those who want to get vaccinated.

Finally, we don't know how long the immunity given by the vaccination will last. If it only lasts a couple of months people might need to get revaccinated again and again throughout the year, which will probably lead to even less people willing to be vaccinated.

So vaccines are very unlikely to be a complete solution by themselves.

We still need mass testing.

Maybe I'm underestimating how fast they can ramp up production on these tests, but you'd need billions a month to just test everyone every week.