The Best Testing? (Hint: Not!)
I got the results from my Covid-19 test back today. It had been twelve days since I had a long swab shoved up my nostril until it collided with my brain. I didn’t have any Covid symptoms, but I needed to get tested to alleviate any concern on the part of my sister, who — after several months of sheltering in place — was coming to visit and worried about my potential exposure to the virus.
After 8 days, I received the following message from the testing lab: “Due to an error, your results were not received. We apologize for the inconvenience and would like to schedule you again.” And then today — twelve days after my test and long after abandoning the idea of seeing my sister — I got another message from the testing lab advising me that my test results were negative. WTF!
I’ve heard many similar stories of lengthy delays in scheduling Covid tests and long waits for the results. And many of those stories come with much greater consequences. Proliferation of the virus within households and amongst colleagues. Weeks of lost productivity. And needless sickness and death.
What good does a Covid test offer if it takes a week or more to schedule and then another week to get the results back? If you are positive, how can you identify and then notify all of your contacts over those previous two weeks (especially if by then you are lying in a hospital bed suffering from the symptoms of the virus)? And if your test results are negative, what can actually be concluded, given your two weeks of subsequent interpersonal interactions (putting aside for the moment the high rate of false negatives these tests generate)?
Despite politically-motivated claims that we have “far more testing than any other country in the world . . . and it’s also the best testing,” our country’s Covid testing system is overwhelmed and unraveling rapidly. It’s not just that our testing numbers are wholly insufficient to ever suppress the virus in our country, but our testing methods fail to provide the timely and accurate results necessary to get us out from under the vicious cycle that enables the virus to continue to spread and thus requires ever more testing.
It’s not even clear our government wants us to have a satisfactory testing system, out of fear that our high number of Covid cases will reflect badly on them. It seems that if they have their way, they will keep us from ever ridding our country of this virus, unnecessarily killing hundreds of thousands of our people along the way, while the rest of the world moves on (and socially distances from us Americans).
It’s time we woke up and smelled the virus. Masks — the closest thing we have to a vaccine at this moment — unfortunately won’t do the job (even if we all wore them, which it turns out we won’t since they have become another divisive issue where politics has triumphed over medical science). As countries such as New Zealand and China have shown us, only extensive testing, tracing and isolation of the contagious can enable us to successfully manage through this pandemic. Wishful thinking from Washington that “like a miracle, it will disappear” unfortunately won’t change our pandemic reality.
On the brighter side, there are a few new testing technologies on the horizon that, if proven out, can become game changers. These tests can provide real-time results, so that the asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic among us can be identified and immediately isolated. If we can test everyone in real time — before they board a plane, file into a stadium, sit down at a restaurant, enter a schoolyard, or attend a business conference — then perhaps these types of tests can lead us back to our former happier way of life. This will require an extensive network of point-of-care testing sites using the latest rapid-testing technology.
But until such an effective testing system can be implemented, we need to stop fooling ourselves that we have “the best testing.” We simply don’t, and as a result, our circumstances are getting worse by the day!
— Randall Sosnick is an entrepreneur and member of the State Bar of California.
© 2020 Randall Sosnick
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