Testing capacity - this is not okay

[Drummonderry]

Had to book a PCR in the week for DS. Closest site was 7.5 miles away. We have no car - so we had to order a postal test which took 4 days in total from order to result.

Today had to book another. Apparently zero appointments available in all of England.

How can we be in this situation 18 months into this pandemic?

Right now.

‘Very few’ appointments in London.

7.2 miles nearest place specifically to me.

Hey op I had the same problem yesterday. Couldn't book a test at all, kept refreshing, only offered test sites miles and miles away, finally got one booked reasonably locally (10 miles) for this morning. We are isolating as DD was in contact with a confirmed case last week, and now has a very high temp. Pretty likely she has it. I also have a sore throat. I'm surprised you are getting such a hard time, and I'm surprised this isn't a news story.

The test centre in our town doesn't appear on website. You have to call 119 and get call handler to search for it by post code. Loads of people in our town get sent miles away as they don't know to demand they search for this one. The test centre staff are lovely, but hugely frustrated that this has been unresolved for last year!

It’s supposed to be easy to get a test - to support people to make good public health choices.

In any case closest centre at any time is 3 miles - which is a long walk there and back if you are not feeling great.

But that is REALLY close. It was the same with people moaning about having to travel for vaccinations. FFS, do you want everything next door to you? Does that seem reasonable? If everyone had everything nextdoor to them, there would be nowhere for anyone to live.

"But that is REALLY close. It was the same with people moaning about having to travel for vaccinations. FFS, do you want everything next door to you? Does that seem reasonable? If everyone had everything nextdoor to them, there would be nowhere for anyone to live."

Exactly. You put the kid in a pram or hop on a bike. Whatever, but it's really very close.

@Drummonderry

Right now.

‘Very few’ appointments in London.

7.2 miles nearest place specifically to me.

Ok but now there are appointments when before they were none. Check again now there may be more still.

I agree OP, I don't know about our local or not testing but I had to travel 15 miles for my vaccination, folk are expected to go miles, lucky I had a car but don't know how those that don't are expected to get there.

@walkoflifewoohoo

It’s not the same as moaning about the vaccination travel. I used public transport to get to my vaccination. And I was not remotely unwell – nor did I have any reason to be concerned that a walk in excess of two hours might make me unwell (and even needing help which would be a wildly irresponsible position to find yourself in with suspected Covid)

And remember – that’s only been occasionally available. The next best option was in excess of five hours round trip walking.

I don’t understand how a developed nation can be satisfied with this.

And not the same as a vaccine because the vaccine needs a HCP to administer!

All you need for the test is someone to give you the test & possibly also then store it until the courier comes.

(Actually I don’t understand why the tests that are done at a centre are processed so much quicker than the tests that I placed in priority postbox… Obviously the testing centres don’t have actually laboratories with them – they are in places like sports field carparks.)

@Drummonderry

Well now yes - but it doesn’t take away that us and the school nurse have had an unreasonably stressy time with how long the first one took.

1 mile would have been fine. Postal tests returned genuinely fast and/or available on demand from school/pharmacy would have been fine. How it’s been: really not fine.

In fact the first test was negative - but we chose to stay self isolating and re-test because the individual involved got more obviously ill.

We are a full week into this pallaver. That would have been a bitter pill to swallow if my ‘hunch’ about people feeling off had been wrong.

Right, so you're a boarding school? Then contact local public help and ask for help with testing the kids because you have an outbreak.

It is rubbish if the postal tests are taking so long and you have no car, but I think this is just how it is unfortunately. Our nearest test centre is an hour's drive away so even with a car it's a right faff and probably easier to just get one in the post.

I don't think it's got anything to do with inequality, but if you want to be able to walk down the road to a test centre they'd surely need to have one within every square mile of the country.

Not a boarding school @MRex. But they send the year group home if there is a positive test. School nurse needed to know - and it was upsetting to feel that we were making her job harder. She had the same expectations as Pp - that we would have a lab result in a day or two.

It happened to be the she had symptom/negative LTF/ negative
PCR - so no one was sent home - but if it had been positive LTF/negative PCR (as I have heard happen) that would have been 59 kids * 3 learning days lost to waiting for the test processing.

It’s more than an inconvenience and acting entitled.

If it was negative LTF/ positive PCR in fact I would have felt much much worse because Track and Trace doesn’t kick in unless there is a positive. No one would have known until it was too late to take precautions to protect vulnerable family members.

It just feels like an incredibly unfair position that I was put in because the testing system does not have capacity to absorb surges in demand.

It's "test and trace", nobody is being "tracked".

Apart from putting a testing centre on every corner, I don't know what more you want. Close contacts won't need to isolate shortly anyway so this won't bother you for much longer.

Ah, so it's in case of a false positive LFT. That's still fairly rare, so you're fine.

@walkoflifewoohoo - I’d like there not to be a large disparity between how fast postal tests are processed and the in person tests are processed.

There will be an extra step to pass from the postie to the testing courier - but the difference is too big - and it will impact the most vulnerable the most

I also want school nurses to have postal PCR tests to hand out to remove the extra day waiting to get hold of a test kit.

And overall I want them to run testing with surplus capacity. Be inefficient in trough times so that wait times don’t increase in peak times.

My impression is that cases in our area (SE) have rapidly taken off over the last week, it's very possible that our local testing capacity is overwhelmed in a way it simply wasn't the week before.

Agree with you that a wait that long is not acceptable but it might be the case for a while...

"I also want school nurses to have postal PCR tests to hand out to remove the extra day waiting to get hold of a test kit."

You'd have to give most schools a school nurse first. A rare thing nowadays. You're lucky.

Both of the testing centres we’ve been to have been in the car parks of large offices. Presumably with wfh guidance ending, those offices theoretically open again and there will be fewer testing centres?