Well, heck. On Sunday I came down with a fever (along with an upsurge in the GERD-related chronic cough I've had for months) so I got to "test" Massachusetts's testing system a bit.
Sunday, I called my PCP's offices and state hotlines, also attempted a state "24/7" text chat line. No response.
Monday, PCP office now open! Answered questions. Got forwarded to a state hotline. Answered more questions. Got appointment at a test facility (outside a local hospital -- well, it's not in my locality but it's local to the place it's in) for Tuesday.
Tuesday, went to the testing center. Followed the Soup Nazi instructions I'd been given by the phone hotline person. ("Follow the signs toward the testing tent. Park in the designated lot. Wear a mask. Walk toward the tent with your ID in your hand.") Got swabbed. It all went very smoothly. Feels weird. No big deal.
I'm suppose to get the results in three to five days. It will likely be three days (that is, Friday) because of the timing of the weekly results cycle. Tests swabbed Thursday or Friday are probably the ones that take up to five days. We'll see.
Does this all seem, like, really slow to anyone else? At this point in MA there's no surge or backlog of cases, so why the (by my count) at least four wasted days? Like, isn't part of the point of testing to start the things you do in case of a positive test as quickly as possible? I don't mean treatment; that has its own timing that depends entirely on symptoms. And I don't mean quarantining myself, which one is instructed to do regardless until results are in. But things like tracing and notifying recent contacts, and initiating "isolation" which in MA has more requirements than mere quarantine.
In typical Covid models an infected person is contagious two to three days before symptoms start. If I get a positive result this Friday I could have been infecting people at the grocery store last Thursday. That's unavoidable, but they could be infecting more people today or tomorrow, which would be avoidable with fast testing and tracing but will be ancient history by Friday. Or Saturday. Or... well, the entire health care system seems to disappear into a time vortex on Sundays, so maybe Monday...
I think what's happened is, Massachusetts has built an electric luxury Cadillac SUV of a testing system, with advanced data tracking and insurance integration features, that has a top speed of 15 MPH and a range of twelve miles. By the time I get my test results, they'll have already been integrated into the daily state "dashboard" report, a masterpiece of infographics. Links will have been established with my medical records, my PCP's office, and my insurance. There will be no hastily scrawled pen and paper notes to be entered into databases later, because it all was done first, with completing the actual test as almost an afterthought.
There was probably no point in picking up the hotline on Sunday because nothing could be done anyhow without the participation of those additional parties and they were closed. And no testing was available Monday because, I don't know, the moon was in the wrong house maybe?
Overall, Massachusetts cases are way down since our epic surge in April, and we're not screwing up our re-opening for dumb political reasons, so I'm not actually complaining. I'm just curious, and perhaps offering another answer to why it takes so much longer to get cases down in the U.S. than it has in other countries. Because though the systems here seem to have a comparable sense of urgency to, say, China, the focus of the urgency is on completing the electronic red tape to produce elegant graphic dashboards instead of on rapid results.
Oh, and I'm already feeling better. The fever's gone and the cough has declined to minor chronic background severity. Though it's still possible I have Covid-19, it's unlikely. (As it should be. Less than three percent of the swab tests in MA are coming up positive these days.) If it is positive my wife and I might have "isolation" hassles to get through (we can't isolate from each other in our 800 sq. ft. one bath; and won't it be much too late for that anyhow, as I was saying above?) but it also means I'll have some immunity at a low cost.
