I was visiting family in California recently and made the mistake of going up to Los Angeles to visit other relatives at a time when Omicron was surging in LA. As it turned out, my relatives had been exposed to the virus by their unvaccinated daughter who stayed at their house even though her husband and son had tested positive for COVID. A test soon revealed she was positive as well and her mother, my boyfriend’s sister, asked her to leave. Sandy (the mother) got tested the next day and she was negative, so I didn’t feel overly concerned. But when I got to their house, she informed me that her husband had not in fact been tested; the online registration process had frustrated him and he had simply walked away. I tried to wear my mask whenever he was close by since I could see he was coughing and had cold symptoms. And I knew my brother wanted me to get tested before I flew up to Santa Cruz to visit him and his long-time partner.
With this in mind, my relatives and I decided we would all get tested. I had already checked with the local CVS and Walgreens and not were they sold out of rapid COVID home tests but they had no available testing appointments before I was slated to leave for Santa Cruz. We decided to go back to the senior center where Sandy had gotten tested before; she said it had only taken 15 minutes. But when we got there at 9 am on a Wednesday, there was already a long line for walk-ins and a second line for people who had made appointments. We waited in line for almost two hours and had almost made it to the front of the line when a staff member came out and informed us that they were going to prioritize the folks who had made appointments and our wait would be at least another two hours. Tired of standing under a hot sun, we bailed.
Without the ability to get tested, I decided not to fly to Santa Cruz on Friday. I didn’t want to risk exposing my brother and his partner, especially since it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to get tested easily. I finally got tested later in the week (after leaving LA), and to my enormous relief, I was negative.
I am relating this saga for only one reason: after almost two years of this infernal pandemic, we still don’t have the resources in place to test Americans when they want and need to be tested, to avoid exposing other people to the highly contagious Omicron variant. On NPR yesterday, there was a report about long lines for COVID testing and empty shelves at pharmacies in San Francisco as well. Is it any wonder that omicron is surging in record numbers throughout the country? Surely, this wealthy nation of ours can do better than this!
Postscript: Could this be why home tests are so scarce? Big corporations have bought most of them up for their employees.
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
