I don't know if any of you guys have been tested, but here is my family's experience. My son was tested on July 2nd, a couple of days after he was exposed to a person that he works with who tested positive. His employer said he had to be tested and could not come back until he had a negative result. So my son, who is a college student, has an apartment in Lawrence but is staying in my house to be closer to his job, isolated himself in his room and minimized his contacts with me, who has some risk due to a compromised immune system and his mother. He was told to expect results within 2-4 days. He had the conventional test run, but also the anti-body test primarily because last fall he contracted something that he eventually gave to me and then his mother that had eerily similar symptoms to what has become COVID, for which he, my wife and myself were treated for in late November, early December of 2019. Meanwhile, I had a trip scheduled to work at a Federal facility in Colorado for about a week and they had issued very concise COVID policies. So on day 5 after the test my son starts calling, goes online to check, etc. to get his results. Nothing...but he does have the antibody test results that say "negative". At day 6 still no results. The testing facility says at that point it could be 6-8 days. At this point, I contact my boss and we discuss the situation with the company owner on putting together a backup plan if my son does not get results back by this past Monday. They also told me to get a test, but by the time I get to the testing facility (that is in my health insurance network and the site my insurance gave me to go to), it is booked through the end of the day. So I eventually get a test after getting up at 4:00 am, going to the testing facilities website, and holding a place in line. I eventually get in, but they claim they called me when my time was scheduled, but I got no call or text and until I finally went over there to inquire they got me in. They had my number, etc, but I looked through my call log and I never got a call. In the interim my son still has not gotten his results on day 7, day 8, day 9....well you get the picture. I ended up calling the testing facility owner's corporate office and spoke with an executive VP (twice) in charge of the clinics conducting the tests. He was able to confirm that the labs got my son's samples on the same day, but that's all the information he had. We had a frank discussion and Bottomline was once the samples go to the lab it is totally dependent on the lab's performance. He detailed that he had some clients who got their results back the next day, most were 2-4 days, although he admitted that the results window was extending to 5-8 days and in exceptional cases 11-13 days. My son inquired with the Clinic's manager at day 9 and was told outright that people showing no symptoms test were the lowest priority to test. Persons with symptoms were the highest priority. In a frank discussion I had with the doctor at the clinic he was telling me that his observation is that the priority for testing has moved away from health care workers and retirement home residents and elective surgery patients are now a higher priority to test. Why? Because elective surgery is a cash cow for hospitals and doctors. We also discussed why asymptomatic people were a lower priority than persons with symptoms. My take is if a person has symptoms they should be self-quarantining anyway, so IMO asymptomatic people should be tested first so that if they test positive, they will know to self-quarantine. Seems stupid to me to make people that are visibly sick who should be quarantining anyway the higher priority. So my son gets his results this morning, he is negative, but his test was 12 days ago. He would be out of self-quarantine in 2 days anyway. He has never shown a symptom, not one. I am still waiting for my test results, day 6 and in the interim, I was not allowed to go on my trip, a substitute had to go. The bottom line is that the labs are just swamped and at this point, testing might be a moot point. I think at this point the government needs to stress effective treatments, collect the plasma from COVID folks and gear that up, not piss around with test you can't get results for in days and now weeks. As for what my family had last fall, the clinic's doctor told me that about that time frame the had a fair number of folks who came in with COVID like symptoms, tested negative for the flu, and life went on. That's what happened in my case, but frankly, there were two nights there were I couldn't breathe to the point that the second night I thought I might be a goner. My wife thought I had pneumonia, it was that bad. But point is that the doctor and his peers are thinking that rash of "flu that did not test as flu" might have been COVID - before Christmas. Who knows?
