Health systems deal with scarcity on a daily basis. There's no room for the emotional hand-wringing you're describing. Moving scarce resources from diagnosis patients to studying the population during a pandemic will be one event in a causal chain that results in deaths. It also prevents the outbreak from spreading beyond control.

Several orders of magnitude more people have been killed by uninformed policy than would have been killed by redirecting a portion of tests. What kind of MONSTER chooses for so many more people to die?!?

At this point do we even need to test most of the serious cases. if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, coughs like a duck, it's a duck. Didn't China start counting cases based on CT scans at one point too?