I’ve been tested at 2 separate sites operated by 2 separate agencies since Saturday. It is currently 01:28 on Tuesday morning. I have no test results.
I was the first testee of the day at 07:00 on Saturday at an appointment that I was able to make the previous day. There were about a dozen staff and 2 people including me waiting to get tested when the Parkmerced Curative testing booth opened. At first, no one knew the code to get into the iPad used to check people in. Then when I got to the booth, the scanner was not properly hooked up via Bluetooth to scan the barcodes on the lab tubes. That took another few minutes to fix. Then, I followed the directions I’d seen on the video they had sent me to watch— apparently too quickly for the attendant to interrupt me to have me break the swab differently so it didn’t explode and drop on the pavement. A second swab needed to be done.
Let’s just say I didn’t feel 100% confident about my test leaving the site. But they told me 48 hours, so I prepared to wait until Monday morning to find out how it went.
By Monday at noon, I had already been refreshing the test status page every few minutes for hours. I had started looking for a different covid test by about 11:00am because my patience was waning. An email to Curative customer support received an auto-response but no actual response. It said my results might not be ready for 72 hours.
By continuing to check for cancellations, I found a test 15 minutes from home around 1pm with the county agency that had previously gotten me results in 24 hours. I scheduled the appointment and went in.
Later in the day, I did finally go back to check Curative’s website to see if there had been any updates to my test status. And there had been!!!!
Apparently my specimen had just been received at the lab for processing 2 days— actually more than 48 hours—after collection. W. T. F.
Now I’m assuming it’s a dead heat— I’ll probably get both results back at the same time late tomorrow or Wednesday. In the meantime, I quarantine.
I’m not quite sure why 9 months into this pandemic we still can’t get reliable and quick covid tests–especially for healthcare workers who have been exposed–but this appears to just be how it goes in America, land of the trump.