Opinion | Dear Biden and Fauci, Try Getting a COVID Test Like an Ordinary Citizen

Leading up to and following the holidays, the Biden administration has continued to urge the general public to test for COVID-19 before gatherings to protect our loved ones and stop the spread of COVID-19.

That is easier said than done. I imagine for President Biden, getting a COVID-19 test is no sweat, he would just have someone come to his office to swab his nostril, and then report back to him his result. Similarly, Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, may just have to walk down to his laboratory and get a test.

For an ordinary citizen, getting a COVID-19 test is more involved and oftentimes takes hours to arrange and necessitates them waiting in long lines. Holiday travel and the rapid spread of Omicron made this even worse.

Weeks before the holidays, drug stores put up signs, “out of rapid COVID-19 tests.” For many, rapid testing is already out of the question.

I saw this situation firsthand. As a family, we all decided that we should get tested a few days before gathering for the holidays. My husband and I started down the road to getting tested. It was a frustrating experience.

We got up early and drove for 30 minutes through rush hour to the COVID-19 testing tent at Beth Israel Deaconess Healthcare in Chelsea, Massachusetts. There was a line winding through the parking lot. A traffic guard stopped us saying, “There is no testing today.” We called before leaving, but there was no recording warning us of the situation.

“When will they start testing again?”

“Maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. Go to St. Rose down the road, there is testing there.”

St. Rose, a local church and testing site, was a mile away. Road construction slowed traffic to a crawl, a two-way street became one-way.

My husband parked illegally while I ran out to read the sign on the church door: “Sorry the testing time has been changed, M-F 1-4:30 p.m., closed Dec. 24.” Underneath, in fine print, the sign listed the old testing times of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Another unforeseen, frustrating obstacle.

Disappointed, we drove home and began searching online for another testing site. I found that most sites only accepted testing by appointment and they were all full for the next several weeks. One Walgreens did not require an appointment. I called and was on hold for a long time. While I perused the website, I saw that the cost for a PCR COVID-19 test was $139 (which they would bill to the patient’s insurance). After waiting for another 15 minutes, I hung up.

I went to the St. Rose website and registered and got myself a testing appointment for the following day. However, we really needed to get tested that day to accommodate our holiday plans safely.

I am an employee of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, so I emailed their employee health team, which has voluntary COVID-19 testing for asymptomatic employees. But because of the holiday crunch, they had halted the program, and were only offering testing for exposed and symptomatic persons.

Worrying that we might not have the result of the COVID-19 test in time for our holiday gathering, I called the number for the Chelsea testing tent to see if it had reopened. The number just had a recording of their regular time. I resorted to calling their urgent care and was told that it had started testing again.

We rushed back down and arrived an hour and 15 minutes before closing time only to be turned away by the traffic police, saying the quota had been reached for the day. They told us to come back the next day. No amount of begging could convince him to let us through.

We then drove the mile back to St. Rose to see if it had opened yet. Luckily, we saw a line had formed, so we joined, and after about an hour, we finally got tested. Once we left, we saw that the line outside the church was even longer than when we arrived.

As we drove home, we wondered about people who have no access to the internet to find places for testing, elderly persons who have difficulty navigating the websites, the people who don’t own cars given that testing sites are not always easily accessible by public transportation, and people who have to take time off work to wait in long lines. My children — who went to a different testing site in Cambridge — waited for 3 hours to get their tests. While the administration just announced that private insurers will soon have to begin covering the cost of eight at-home rapid tests for their members, these tests are often difficult to find, and millions of Americans remain uninsured or have public insurance. COVID-19 testing needs to be more accessible.

I challenge either Biden or Fauci to go down the path that an ordinary citizen has to take just to get a COVID-19 test.

Kwan Kew Lai, MD, DMD, is an infectious disease physician, Harvard Medical Faculty physician, author, and disaster response medical volunteer. Her third book, The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly, will be published in late 2022.