According to that TWiV episode, such tests could cost just $1.

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.

You wouldn't be delivering 1 test per person per day. You'd deliver a month's worth for a whole household. There's about 52 million households divided by 30 days = 1.7 million packages per day. A 1% increase. I wonder how much of an increase in shipping Christmas is.

There's certainly lots of ways to optimize this (30 day supply in 1 box). The scale is still immense.

Okay, now do the math on loaves of bread that manage to make it into homes. Or rolls of toilet paper. If the price really could be down to $1 per test, and manufacturing capacity exists (or could be made to exist), the market would figure out a way to get these tests in enough places to be massively effective. And the government could even fill in some gaps.

The market would also find a way to jack the price up.

As with everything else, the market would simultaneously have offerings with higher prices and offerings with lower prices. There's not just one price.

The scale is enormous but so is the scale of actions we did take. Billions of dollars in aid to individuals and aid/loans to businesses. Government funding for operation warpspeed to develop vaccines. High unemployment and a reduced economy for months as the pandemic continued.

Exactly. This is literally chump change compared to how much did the pandemic cost the economy.

This is a no brainer.

I bet some companies are working on a repeatable device that runs / re-runs tests. Think of it like a thermometer - you can reuse it as often as you like and get results in seconds.

Of course that doesn't exist yet, but it would solve all the problems you mention.

I'm sure. However the previous comment was lamenting that the government didn't do this for us at the beginning. Even If the test existed (it didn't), and had the money to do so (which is also huge), scaling manufacturing is a real challenge, mailing to 128m households is a huge challenge.

There's no need to mail tests to each individual end user.

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.

The head of government knew exactly how dangerous the virus was in early February, but chose not to do anything about it.

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.

Nah, bundle up tests in 30 day increments. 300 million tests a day becomes 10 million boxes a day. Large, but not impossible.

lots of ways to optimize, but the scale is still immense.

We already manufacture and distribute paper products on an immense scale even without it being a national (or global) emergency.

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.

I missed the link to the TWiV episode. do you have it?

6'20" in to episode 640:

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-640/