You guys, we HAVE TO fix the testing. A thread.

A close family friend has had mild Covid symptoms for the past several days. She is in a high-risk category: over 65 and living with an autoimmune disorder.

Testing is very hard to come by in our rural county. However...

Today there was a pop-up National Guard testing site close to her home. She did everything she was supposed to do — “registered” online yesterday, woke up early and arrived within an hour of the site opening.

By the time she got there, the line of cars was backed up for a mile down the state highway. No one was directing traffic. No one was counting to see how many more cars it was reasonable for the site to accept given the number of tests available.

She waited one hour to get to the driveway of the testing site.

Once she entered the driveway maze, there was no way out. She was stuck there, inching along for another hour. She was still too far away to even see the testing site.

After the second hour, the line stopped moving entirely. I believe this is when the site ran out of testing supplies. But no one came out to announce the site was closed. No one sent the hundreds of cars lined up on the highway home.

She is still stuck there. And now is when I tell you that her autoimmune disease is Crohn’s. If you know anything about Crohn’s, you know that sufferers CANNOT be away from a bathroom for any significant length of time.

So think of pretty much the worst case scenario that could happen when a Crohn’s sufferer is literally trapped in their car for several hours, and... that happens.

It still took her another 30 minutes after that to get her car to a place where she could remove the orange cones from blocking her way in the parking lot and make an emergency exit.

2.5+ hours waiting for a Covid test, and she never got one!

IT SHOULD NEVER BE THIS HARD.

Thousands of cases are going undiagnosed because of it.

Thousands of people are just walking through their lives spreading a potentially deadly virus because we have made it nearly IMPOSSIBLE for them to do the responsible thing and get tested.

I am so furious at the county for dropping the ball on testing, at the National Guard for their total lack of organization at the testing site, at the utter lack of a federal response to this pandemic that has gotten us to this point!