I do not wish to put words in your mouth so I am asking... "are you suggesting that unless we KNOW the person is Covid-19 free that we wear mask?"
Mmm. For cloth masks to work effectively, that's not too far from what's recommended. To be clear, though, in what you wrote, you were stressing the concept of "If you're sick, stay home!" That's not controversial from a public health standpoint, even if the Trump Administration (pushed by corporate interests and re-election desires) has taken action to fight against that. Seriously consider the situation, though. People infected with COVID-19 are frequently contagious while having no actionable symptoms to justify staying home. While COVID-19 can be said to be under control in some parts of the world, it's not even remotely under control in the US and has spread pretty much everywhere in the US. Recommended or mandatory cloth mask, depending on the place and situation, combined with general social distancing, are something of a compromise to try to allow life to be as close to normal as possible and to
stay that way until the situation changes for the better. To poke at the perspective in play, again, it's not so much about individuals as it's about the community dealing with a natural disaster. Dealing with natural disasters is rarely going to be a pleasant experience for anyone involved, but as long as the community works together, the losses can usually be mitigated.
I will modify my statement. Everyone that I know who went to get a test... was able to do so.
If we're talking personal stories, my mother, who works in a hospital, was unable to get tested when she likely got sick with COVID-19, though she was also able to work from home during that period. It has been a number of weeks since then, though, and testing capacity has increased since. A friend of mine works at a company that offered tests for the people who wanted to get tested, then decided not to let my friend actually get tested when he tried to take advantage of the offer.
If the people you know went relatively recently, then yeah, it's sorta to be expected that they could get a test, now that testing capacity has expanded greatly and the base load is actually being handled with some room to spare. Testing is not being done to capacity currently, as it is, though, likely for a variety of reasons that don't need to be poked at for the moment. The positives are rising in far too many places in the US, though, which likely also means that there will be notably increasing demand again. Hopefully, testing capacity will at least stay ahead of baseline demand from now on, though that's hardly a certainty.
