Sure, but why is a test needed for that? Why not test for any of the other sicknesses then, and not just covid 19?

It all seems similar to security theater after 9/11. A lot of effort and expense for little gain so somebody can say they did something.

What if you don't have symptoms, but know you were exposed to Covid? What if your symptoms are mild and you aren't even sure are caused by a communicable disease?

If I isolated every time I got the sniffles or was more tired than usual I'd be home a lot..

Exactly, why is covid 19 still getting put on a pedestal? RSV is worse for kids than covid 19, yet daycare does not shutdown for 2 weeks because of RSV.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33015684/

Society's risk tolerances are being very inconsistent right now, and the only reason I can see is for political purposes (i.e. cover your ass).

Is it worse for adults / elderly? Are the long term risks of RSV as fuzzy as covid?

By the way, I'm not claiming we should be more strict about any of this, but on a personal level I'd rather do my best to not infect others.

I also want to do my best not to infect others, but I do not see people risking their economic livelihood to do that outside of those with the luxury of working from home.

I guess what I am getting at is the dichotomy of leaders officially acting if people should test and quarantine and all that jazz, while obviously knowing that those who need to go out and work to put food on the table and funds in the retirement account will continue to do so.

Based on the stats, I would bet all I have on one of those snot nosed kids at my kids' daycare having covid right now. But I am sure many or most of the parents need to work for the cash to meet the mortgage payments or whatever their expected quality of life is.

Even if somebody does have to go to work while sick with covid for whatever reason, they can avoid other nonessential contact with people based on their test result.

I do agree there's a lot of hypocrisy and ass-covering going on. Even earlier in the pandemic healthcare workers were discouraged from getting tested so they wouldn't need to stay home from work. I think making tests available prevents at least some unnecessary transmission which is good enough for me.

I think you are correct, making the tests available is probably good. Maybe we should have similar availability for other infections.

RSV isn't currently killing ~1800k Americans a day.

RSV has no vaccine unlike Covid 19. If people do not want to get vaccinated, then that is their problem.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths-by-vaccination

From that link, like 1 in 10 people dying are vaccinated. And even ignoring that, I will still personally choose to stay home when infected with covid even if it only helps the unvaccinated.

There's no approved vaccine yet for the daycare-aged population being discussed.

The daycare age population are not the ones dying. Point being that yes, COVID 19 is resulting in more deaths than RSV nationwide, but as a vaccinated individual, I am more concerned about RSV (one of my kids has already got it), than I am from COVID 19.

> The daycare age population are not the ones dying.

Which, if daycares were run by the toddlers independently of adult supervision, would be a great point.

Infected individuals often have a period where they are actively infecting others but not yet showing symptoms.

Right, same as all the other viruses floating around, that we also had before SARS-CoV-2 or covid-19 or whatever.

I get the initial lockdowns and period of time to figure out this new thing, but at this point in time, I do not see how people's risk profile is any different than what it was before Dec 2019.

>I do not see how people's risk profile is any different than what it was before Dec 2019.

There are virtually zero deaths attributable directly to flu by hospitals. The vast majority are imputed by estimated excess deaths.

So even by completely different and unfair metrics, covid is vastly more dangerous. If you went by that standard covid likely has claimed over a million US deaths already, compared to a few tens of thousand for flu.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

On top of that, covid has a significantly higher R0 value, which means you’re much, much more likely to come into contact with it.

That’s how you change your risk calculation: it’s the cost of getting it (probability of death or maiming) times the probability of getting it (community spread level and nasal viral shedding rate). There is no mitigating factor here wrt covid vs flu risk.

Flu, I believe, is most contagious when you’re feeling ill. That’s one huge difference between this pandemic and just your typical flu.

You can’t isolate if you don’t know you’re sick.

That does seem to be changing now that we've all been vaccinated, though. It seems that training your immune system to recognize the virus leads to symptoms developing earlier in the course of disease, below the ~10^6 copies/mL threshold a rapid test can detect. I don't know if everybody who is vaccinated is getting early symptoms but anecdotally it seems to be pretty common.

Two reasons, IMO.

  1. Things such as influenza mostly spread when the person is symptomatic.
  2. Something along the lines of 50% of covid infections are from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Self isolating when you have symptoms is certainly good, but it is by no means the entire picture.