Americans face testing delays as virus surges
AUSTIN, Texas
With a cough and shortness of breath, it took Austin, Texas, resident Sam Lee three tries to get a COVID19 test.
The first time, he showed up an hour before the public testing site was set to close and was told they had reached capacity. He was turned away from a second centre when rain shut it down, and voluntarily left a third after someone ahead of him said they had been waiting in line for more than three hours.
“If you have symptoms and you are just driving around the city trying to figure out how you can get a test, for people who are positive, it is not ideal,” said Lee, who finally got a test on June 29 after he showed up at a site before dawn and waited for more than two hours. Another five days passed before he was able to view the results online, and he didn’t receive a text with the results until seven days after being tested.
Four months, 3 million confirmed infections and over 130,000 deaths into the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., Americans confronted with a resurgence of the scourge are facing long lines at testing sites in the summer heat or are getting turned away. Others are going a week or more without receiving a diagnosis.
Some sites are running out of kits, while labs are reporting shortages of materials and workers to process the swabs.
Some frustrated Americans are left to wonder why the U.S. can’t seem to get its act together, especially after it was given fair warning as the virus wreaked havoc in China and then Italy, Spain and New York.
“It’s a hot mess,” said 47-year-old Jennifer Hudson of Tucson, Arizona. “The fact that we’re relying on companies and we don’t have a national response to this, it’s ridiculous.”
It took Hudson five days to make an appointment through a CVS pharmacy near her home. She booked a drive-up test over the weekend, more than a week after her symptoms – fatigue, shortness of breath, headache and sore throat – first emerged. The clinic informed her that her results would probably be delayed.
Testing has been ramped up nationwide, reaching about 640,000 tests per day on average, up from around 518,000 two weeks ago, according to an AP analysis.