The reason to want to do it is simple: I travel a great deal, and I was also one of the many people who thought they might have had a milder version of coronavirus earlier in the year.

When I was sidelined with the flu in January, I thought nothing of it, until it degenerated into one of the weirdest and most painful bouts of flu I have ever had. There were fever spikes, aches, nausea, lack of smell, a persistent dry cough — all of which were later flagged as key symptoms of Covid-19. I recovered after three truly awful weeks of debilitating illness. Once the coronavirus was in full swing, I wondered if I had been an early victim.

So I checked, and here is what happened: The test I received in the mail, which is not yet approved by the F.D.A., was self-administered, arriving with a lancet to poke my finger, a pipette to draw the blood out and collect it, a tube of solution and two plastic test strips that determine the presence of certain proteins — antibodies — in the body.

The home tests are meant as a start, much the way other self-testing products are. Honestly, the whole setup looked like a home pregnancy test, except using blood instead of urine, and was just as frictionless.

Well, except for the finger poke, which was not as easy as I thought. After a long existential moment with the lancet, I drew a few drops of blood, combined them with the solution, and then added a few drops to a small plastic testing device. A line immediately appeared on an indicator strip to indicate that the test was working. I then waited for eight minutes to see if the other line would appear, which would show I had the antibodies.

No such luck. Like a lot of people, I had hoped to be able to know that my very presence was not harmful to others. This is a big deal, as our national medical star Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently noted in an interview on NBC: “There may be many people out there, and I suspect there are a fair amount, that have been infected, were asymptomatic and didn’t know it.”

It is a national tragedy that “don’t know” is pretty much how we are operating these days. Especially since we live in a world where we are tracked constantly by big corporations, where we send plumes of data and cough up information to them constantly. And yet we cannot do that for our own benefit when it comes to our real lives.