Why Is the Government Still Paying for Covid Tests?

Four years ago, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. public-health establishment set the conditions for a panic unlike anything witnessed in our lifetimes. Through an unholy combination of social-distancing edicts, stay-at-home orders, and vaccine mandates, the establishment induced a state of over-the-top alarm among millions of Americans.

These days, the most the bureaucrats can hope to provoke in the population is not compulsory panic but something like officially-sanctioned hypochondria.

Last week, I read that the U.S. government had resuscitated its pandemic-era initiative of flooding the country with free Covid tests. According to the Associated Press, the government will again provide families with as many as four tests “on the house,” so to speak—an act of would-be charity that loses some of its punch after the AP notes that the average cost of an over-the-counter test amounts to a whopping $11. 

Among other things, here we have a particularly pitiful example of a nanny state that condescendingly assumes that its subjects cannot even pull together the equivalent of the cost of a Big Mac, a medium French fries, and some pop. “Insurers are no longer required to cover the cost of the tests,” the AP glumly notes. (Two cheers for insurers!)

My objection to the reconstitution of the Covid test giveaway program, however, has relatively little to do with the tests being made available for free. Instead, I reserve my greatest disapproval for the assumption implicit in the proposition: That the public should be encouraged to monitor the nature and severity of their upper-respiratory symptoms to such an extent that it is worth distinguishing Covid from influenza, the common cold, hay fever, or a bad case of “I’ve been cleaning the attic and kicked up a lot of dust.” This amounts to a normalization of the unnatural obsessing over germs. If the government ever makes public the number of people who have signed up to receive the new free Covid tests, the figure might give us a clue about just how many of our fellow citizens can be led by the government to become as neurotic as Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters. (Allen, in that movie, mistook a stain on his shirt for skin cancer.) 

To the best of my recollection, I have made use of a Covid test exactly once in my life—something I admit with a fair degree of sheepishness if not genuine repentance. Although I instantly viewed with intense skepticism the pandemic-excused shutdown of civilization as we knew it, I was not exempt from worrying about catching the virus. In my defense, my single use of a Covid test came early in the pandemic, and its negative result—the fact that I had bought a silly test when there was nothing wrong with me at all!—taught me a lesson: Catching a case of hypochondria is far worse than catching a case of the sniffles.

I also concluded that to test oneself for Covid encouraged the spurious thinking that catching Covid was itself a rare, notable, or, indeed, avoidable occurrence. The logic went something like this: Covid was singularly strange and scary, and so testing for it—something we do not do for more innocuous infections like the common cold—was called for. But the opposite was plainly true: Covid would eventually become so ubiquitous as to render testing for it decidedly anticlimactic. Therefore, to cease testing for Covid was to accept the inevitability of Covid—a healthy affirmation of reality.

And Covid did come for your faithful correspondent: Over the last few years, I have caught an upper-respiratory virus on at least three occasions, and the odds are likely that each time I had Covid. Yet I did not test myself once, so who knows? As I was sidelined with a fever, headache, and sore throat, I was more concerned with attempting to write and file my deeply engaging opinion journalism than I was with confirming that I had this virus rather than that virus. Actually, the fact that I can readily recall the number of times I have had Covid or some Covid-like condition must in and of itself be counted as a personal failing: We all get colds—stop keeping count!

The return of the free Covid tests might appear to be just another example of pandemic-era detritus. Perhaps it is no more significant than encountering the occasional discarded mask in a parking lot. Indeed, it is hard not to chuckle when standing in line at a store and looking down to find the scuffed-up stickers that once attempted to demarcate 6-foot social distancing; these are artifacts as surely as a book of S&H Green Stamps. 

Yet I maintain that the resuscitation of the Covid test handout scheme amounts to something more ominous: an attempt to convert panic into hypochondria, and thus free-thinking, otherwise sensible-minded citizens into permanent worrywarts.