Lidiya: Everything you say here about overtesting and the economic interests behind it is true. Still there may be a few (just very few) examples of chronic (emphasis on chronic) diseases for which it may be justified to screen asymptomatic people. Breast cancer and colon cancer come to mind. There are criteria to determine what diseases should be screened, which are too long to comment here. But for acute diseases, such as covid, it has never been considered appropriate to test asymptomatic persons. We have never tested asymptomatic people for influenza, or mono, or mycoplasma, or dengue, or any acute disease. It is just never done... not even in a world with economic incentives for overtesting. With covid, they have reinvented the way things are done in medicine.
Lidiya: Everything you say here about overtesting and the economic interests behind it is true. Still there may be a few (just very few) examples of chronic (emphasis on chronic) diseases for which it may be justified to screen asymptomatic people. Breast cancer and colon cancer come to mind. There are criteria to determine what diseases should be screened, which are too long to comment here. But for acute diseases, such as covid, it has never been considered appropriate to test asymptomatic persons. We have never tested asymptomatic people for influenza, or mono, or mycoplasma, or dengue, or any acute disease. It is just never done... not even in a world with economic incentives for overtesting. With covid, they have reinvented the way things are done in medicine.