by Barbara Nevins Taylor

Bigelow pharmacy in Greenwich Village thought it was ready.  Customers snapped up the first batch of at-home COVID-19 tests in early December. So the pharmacy reordered. But during the third week in December, it sold out 1,600 tests in three days, far more than it imagined people would want. “It’s crazy,” Ian Ginzburg, Bigelow’s owner said. “People freaked out. I don’t know if they will continue to freak out.”

There’s plenty of reason to freak out.  COVID-19 cases doubled in one day in New York and they continue to rise. Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We’re facing a major challenge with the Omicron variant. This is an urgent situation and we need to act urgently. We are seeing a very substantial rise in the member of cases in a way we haven’t seen previously.”

The mayor said the city would increase testing substantially with more pop-up sites and more at-home test kits. But he called on the federal government to help increase the number of kits available. He said that he “…would urge that the President invoke the Defense Production Act and use every tool that the private sector has and the public sector has to continue to provide supplies here and around the country.”

And testing is now a major part of the Biden Administration’s effort to control COVID. “We have to do better on testing,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical advisor on COVID, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Testing, he said, has to go hand-in-hand with the two-shot vaccines and boosters. But COVID testing seems rocky, at least in New York City 

When you want to get a test, you find long lines outside COVID testing sites.

And then there is the wait for results. One of my students — I teach journalism at The City College of New York — tested positive. A week earlier, I sat near her  at a computer helping with a video story.  Although I didn’t have any symptoms, I thought it was a good idea to get tested. The lines at three places near where I live were long and I ended up at a Labworq.  The q is the way they spell it. 

You register through your phone on the spot and give insurance information or show some kind of government ID, and then a technician takes two nasal swaps. The swaps go in a sterile tube with your name and phone number.  Then you wait.  The online information says that the results will come back in 24 to 48 hours. But I had the test on Tuesday and by Friday afternoon, I still hadn’t heard a thing. If I had COVID, this would be a big problem for me and the others with whom I had come in contact. 

I emailed customer support and received a reasonably quick response. “Your results are not ready yet. I cannot tell you exactly when the results will come since it does not depend upon me.  I am doing everything in my power to ensure that the laboratory knows that your result is subject to urgent processing.”

And a little while later, I received an email from the lab, not the same company, and the results were negative. Good for me. But others may not be so lucky and it would be helpful and important now to make sure labs can process these tests in a more timely way and that more at-home kits are available to all of us.