Free Covid tests are scarce as infection levels increase in the U.S.

As a result, those who still factor covid into their daily lives are weighing whether it’s worth roughly $12 to test for every sniffle and scratchy throat and every visit to grandma. The costs quickly add up for larger families and for people who’ve contracted covid intent on protecting others by following federal guidelines to test repeatedly to end isolation and masking.

What the end of the covid public health emergency means for you

This new landscape for testing presents one of the starkest examples of living in a society that treats covid as any other endemic respiratory virus. In a nation with widespread immunity, most covid infections are mild with a greater danger to the elderly and severely immunocompromised.

“We are going to continue to see people hospitalized for covid for illnesses that could have been prevented had testing been freely and widely available,” said William Schaffner, a medical professor who specializes in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Coronavirus is increasing by multiple measures — but it’s not causing alarm among public health officials.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 9,000 covid-19 hospital admissions in the week ending July 29, a 12.5 percent increase from the week before. But that’s far below the nearly 45,000 admissions recorded the same week a year ago. The percentage of emergency department patients diagnosed with covid-19 has risen gradually in July but is less than a fifth of where it was a year ago. Experts believe there’s likely an uptick in mild coronavirus cases outside of the health-care system as well.

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