Seven days in a basement waiting
Anxiety and loneliness grew as man waited week for COVID test
For nearly seven days, Stephen McGarry’s basement was the loneliest place he could be.
Although just a flight of stairs away from his wife and two young children, McGarry could not spend time with them. His office remained open, but he was forced to work remotely. And all the time, there was a singular thought that repeated in his head.
Do I have COVID-19?
“It is pretty anxious, and you get a little paranoid. Every cough or sniffle, you worry if you have it,” said McGarry, 49, who spent nearly a week in isolation waiting for an appointment from Niagara Health to get a COVID-19 test. “Then you worry if you passed it on to your family.”
McGarry’s COVID-19 scare began Sept 30 when he developed a cough and headache, both possible symptoms of a novel coronavirus infection. He reported his symptoms to his employer, who said given those symptoms McGarry would require a negative COVID-19 test before he could return to work.
So he did what public health officials, including Niagara’s acting medical officer of health, have advised for months: Arrange for a COVID-19 test and isolate yourself until the results come in.
“So I called Niagara Health. You don’t talk to a person, it’s a message and it says to leave your information and you will get a call back within 48 hours,” McGarry said. “It did say they were dealing with a high volume, but I did not expect this kind of delay.”
So he waited. And then waited some more.
With no call-back by Oct. 2, and the cough and headache still lingering, McGarry phoned Niagara Health a second time and left another message.
“It does prey on your mind a bit and you start to worry,” he said. “Is this my fault? Did I leave the wrong information or the wrong number?”
Having left a second message, McGarry waited again.
By this point, he was feeling the stress of the forced separation from his family. He
couldn’t have dinner with his wife, play with his daughter or take his son to soccer. The rare time he went upstairs, he was masked and stayed physically away from them.
“That’s when it gets really lonely,” he said.
And still, the call from Niagara Health did not come. He called a third time on Oct. 4 and tried not to let his irritation show in his voice.
“You cannot really get upset at an answering machine, but at that point it was getting frustrating,” he said.
That day he got a call back from Niagara Health. There was no acknowledgement of his previous calls, but he was scheduled for a test Oct 6.
“From that point, it was very quick,” McGarry said. “The test itself at the hospital, the drivethrough at the St. Catharines hospital, was 15 maybe 20 minutes.”
Two days later, the result came back.
Negative.
Although life went back to normal for McGarry, he remains puzzled why it would take seven days to get an appointment.
While he did the right thing by isolating himself until the test results came back, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health Dr. Mustafa Hirji said that is not always the case.
Some people in Niagara have been going out on their usual routines while awaiting a test result.
“If you think you might have the virus, that is why you are getting tested, then you need to self-isolate until the results are in,” he said.
Derek McNally, Niagara Health executive vice president clinical services, said he did not know what happened in McGarry’s case but that most appointments are scheduled within 48 hours of the initial phone call.
“I will certainly look into it if (McGarry) would contact us, and we can talk about it,” he said.
McNally did acknowledge that in late September the COVID-19 assessment centres in St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland were overwhelmed by demand. At the time, the centres were taking self-referred walk-ins for tests, and cars were lining up by the dozens hours before they opened.
The situation was playing out across the province; by Sept. 26, Premier Doug Ford announced walk-ins and asymptomatic testing were being halted as the entire testing regime was being overwhelmed.
McNally said it took several days for Niagara Health to clear the backlog of people who had already had testing appointments prior to the end of walk-ins. However, he did not know why McGarry would not have heard back from Niagara Health before Oct 6.
The volume of demand for testing remains an issue across Ontario.
Hirji said there is confusion about why some test results aren’t being reported quickly.
“The delays are not consistent from region to region and week to week,” he said.
Last week, for instance, Niagara was getting test results back quickly. By this week, however, just over 45 per cent of results were being reported within 24 hours, placing Niagara among the worst in Ontario that week.
Aside from further frustrating people waiting to know if they are infected, the delay also slows the vital contact-tracing process by the public health department to locate and isolate possible linked cases.
Speed in contact tracing is important, Hirji said, because the longer it takes to find someone who may have been exposed to a known case, the longer that person might be inadvertently infecting other people.