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I was tested for COVID nine days ago and I still do not have results. When I contacted the lab last week about how long it was taking they said the wait time is a minimum of 9 days (Story/rant in thread).
My wife, who got her test done at the same facility and processed by the same lab two days after me, got her test results four days after being tested (negative thank God). So tests are slow AND being processed out of order for some reason.
I am no longer symptomatic for whatever it is that caused my fever, and my own illness is now far from my greatest concern. The number of tests we do as a state or a country is entirely meaningless if they are not processed within a reasonable time window.
It's now 12 days since I first started showing symptoms. If I hadn't quarantined effectively, contact tracing with those sort of testing turnarounds would be useless. The people I might have infected would have infected other people who would have infected other people etc.
The point of this thread is that anyone that is comforted by the rising number of tests being performed should take a step back and realize that in many circumstances all we have done is increase our capacity to administer tests without increasing our ability to process them.
Things are bad and still getting worse. Failures are manifold and successes seem to be deceiving. We can get through this only if it is taken seriously and a lot of incredibly hard work is put in. Too many people are doing neither.
