Useful for public health authorities to track the spread of the disease, perhaps, but what will it do elsewise?

What will an individual do with the results, positive or negative? Lining up with other people, possibly exposing yourself to a virus you don’t yet have, carries risk, and the reward of testing is that either you have it, in which case stay home, or you don’t, in which case stay home.

UPDATE: What I said. LA County to doctors: don’t bother.

A surge in coronavirus cases has Los Angeles County health officials telling doctors to give up on testing patients in the hope of containing the outbreak and instructing them to test patients only if a positive result could change how they would be treated, according to a new report.

The advisory from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Thursday was prompted by a crush of patients and shortage of tests and could make it difficult to ever know precisely how many people in L.A. County contracted the virus, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The department “is shifting from a strategy of case containment to slowing disease transmission and averting excess morbidity and mortality,” according to the letter, the Times reported. Doctors should test symptomatic patients only when “a diagnostic result will change clinical management or inform public health response.”