this country is incredible. I felt shocking last week -- headache, temperature, shortness of breath, so i booked in for a covid test.

turned up at the drive-in the next day: NO ONE was there (probably like me most people had no idea you could book a test -- that's UK govt comms for you). There were 3.5k slots available. it felt like being in a nuclear fallout site

(should stress the staff there were all lovely, but there were SO many of them and 1 (one) of me. I'm sure they were extremely bored.)

anyway, I was told I would receive my results in max 48 hours, but likely 24 hours. It has now been 3 days. I had no idea what i was meant to do if I didn't receive my test results so I googled. There's a number to call. I called it.

Turns out there's no way of telling me my results unless I had kept hold of a little piece of paper I was given on the day that at no point did anyone tell me was that important i hold on to or that i wouldn't be able to find out my results without.

so did I have covid? Who knows certainly not the UK government

tbh given i had to carry out the test myself (another baffling decision by this govt -- any HCW could tell you you really need a trained person to successfully get a back of the throat swab) i probably made a balls-up of it anyway but still it would have been nice to know

i just can't get over that we are in the 21st century and we are still relying on people holding on to little pieces of paper (especially when we don't tell them how important those pieces of paper are).