if it had been emphasized and prioritized (as opposed to the President making clear he didn't want to see the numbers go up)? I feel confident that our scientists and people responsible for cutting any red tape could have figured that out if it had been set as the #1 priority. And plenty of experts were calling for it early on, so that is not a 20/20 hindsight thing.

NYC would likely have shut down either way, but testing could have identified the outbreak in NYC sooner and allowed a shutdown there before it got as bad as it did. And testing to identify where the outbreaks were throughout the country could have allowed (the first wave of) shutdowns to be limited to just NYC and other hotspots, as opposed to having to shut everything down everywhere because we can't see where and how concentrated cases are. (And shutting down NYC sooner would have limited/slowed the spread from people who traveled from NYC to other parts of the country.)

I'm not saying there wouldn't be significant disruptions, but it's possible we could have avoided having the whole country only allowed to leave their homes for the grocery store and that's it. Some localities would be that way for stretches (not all at the same time), but rolling shutdowns like that would be less damaging to the economy.

Again, even if a fictional perfect president executed the perfect playbook perfectly, we would still have major disruptions to daily life, a lot of deaths, and significant impact to the economy. But you can't tell me that we would be in the same place if the President had treated this seriously instead of dismissing it until mid-March, and as part of that had prioritized testing from the beginning.