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NPR Cookie Consent and Choices.A Montanan drove an hour each way to get a test, wondering whether, this time, it would again take five days to get results. While Covid testing is much easier to come by than it was early in the pandemic , the ability to get a test — and timely results — can vary widely nationwide.
A fragmented testing system, complicated logistics, technician burnout and squirrelly spikes in demand contribute to the bumpy ride. Unpredictable waits can be a problem for those trying to plan travel, return to school from quarantine — or even get lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatment within the optimal window if they do have Covid.
But people are also facing problems getting molecular testing, including the gold-standard PCR tests. Public health labs are no longer hamstrung by supply bottlenecks for individual test components, such as swabs or reagents, said Kelly Wroblewski, the director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. But they are still bearing large testing loads, which she had expected to shift more to commercial or hospital-based labs by now.
For full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Even in a place like Longmont, Colorado, near many laboratories and hospitals, PCR samples from the local mass-testing site get shipped by air each evening to a lab in North Carolina.
That mass-testing operation recently moved back to its original location at the county fairgrounds after a summer stint in a small church parking lot. Campbell said it sometimes took residents four or five days to get their PCR results, although that has dropped to two as the contractor, Mako Medical, has built its laboratory capacity back up. Portable devices can now eliminate the need to ship samples. They can do molecular analysis, including PCR analyses, in under an hour — a process that typically takes at least four to five hours in a lab.
A Washington, D. Combined, they can give a dozen people PCR results in under an hour, at no cost to test-takers. Still, demand outweighs supply for such fast molecular tests, largely because of the roller coaster of case surges, said Doug Sharpe, the vice president of lab capital sales for Medline Industries , which supplies Covid testing components to labs across the country.
The company offers other tests, such as antigen tests and slower lab-based PCR tests, at no out-of-pocket cost. Celeste Di Iorio felt fleeced after she spent a day driving from pharmacy to pharmacy in Fort Collins, Colorado, in search of a test that would give an answer in less than three days. As a musician, she had been traveling out of state and wanted to know whether she might be infectious before she attended, among other things, a memorial for a relative who died of Covid. She and her partner eventually found rapid antigen tests at a pharmacy two cities over.
In Helena, Montana, Stanfel has gotten a PCR test every week for many months because she takes immune-suppressing drugs for a rare condition called sarcoidosis.
It took five days to learn that she had tested negative. It has had to prioritize tests from hospitalized or symptomatic people and send other specimens to private labs, a process that can stretch the wait time for results to up to seven days.
In New York City, where mobile-testing vans are parked in every borough and in-person home testing is offered, residents report quick turnarounds for molecular tests because the labs analyzing their samples are close by. Aspinall said flu season is likely to lead to an increase in demand for Covid testing as people with Covid-like symptoms seek answers about the causes of their illnesses, compounding staffing issues.
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