BUFFALO (WBEN) - As we're now starting the cold and flu season, some are worried about overlapping symptoms with COVID-19 and what it could mean for your wallet in regard to testing protocols at school and work.
"There's a huge overlap of symptoms between influenza and COVID," said Dr. Tom Russo, chief of Infectious Disease at the Jacobs School of Medicine.
"Both are upper respiratory tract infections; both can give you fever, cough, aches, headaches. The one symptom that is maybe somewhat distinguishing for COVID is loss of taste and smell, but occasionally that can occur with influenza as well, so as a result, the only way to determine whether you have one or the other or both is through testing, and obviously, testing costs money."
Congressman Brian Higgins said more accessible testing is vital in the process of getting past the pandemic.
"This is a pandemic; this is global," Higgins began. "The United States is the richest country in the history of the world - obviously we should have more testing infrastructure for our people to make it easily accessible, and that's one of the components to the equation of getting by this and managing this pandemic."
There is a large variance in costs associated with testing, depending on the location and the kind of test needed. Prices may effectively close people out of the testing process, which of course, isn't in the best interest of public health.
"Testing should be free as well," Higgins continued. "If you want to encourage testing, have more testing facilities and much like the vaccine, keep it at no cost - remove that economic disincentive to doing the right thing."
Russo agrees with Higgins that more should be done to remove barriers to testing that may exist.
"Getting inexpensive or available testing, or free testing as soon as possible, would be greatly beneficial from a public health point of view," said Russo.
