Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. My problem is that my "really bad cold that lingered" was in February 2020.

That is late enough in the timeline, and the testing at that time was so insufficient, that it's really hard to say.

I don't recall losing my sense of smell, but I have been struggling more with concentration issues and depression since then. Of course, that could also be due to all the stress over losing a friend to COVID, the lockdown, the political situation in the US, etc.

The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.

View on HN

>The biggest disappointment for me in the whole COVID response has been the complete failure of ramping up COVID testing and doing random testing or testing of those who hadn't traveled to China.

I had a viral illness back in July with symptoms that couldn't rule out Covid-19. I went to get tested the very next day as soon as I possibly could have and quarantined while I waited. At the time I got tested I was told the backlog was on the order of 3-5 days for Quest. I ended quarantine 2 weeks later, not because I got test results back, but because they waited so long that even if it came back positive I already met the CDC guidelines to end quarantine regardless. Rather than processing the tests they could manage in a timely fashion they were wasting tests on samples so old it didn't even matter what the result was.

Rather than a priority queue they should have been handling tests like a priority stack. I'm sure it would suck to be told "sorry we're not going to check your sample, assume it's positive" but at least then you could manage quarantine and contact tracing in a timely manner instead of waiting so long it's basically useless. Not to mention the government no doubt paid Quest for all of those useless tests vs. Quest only getting paid for the amount they could do in a timely manner. Doing it a reasonable way would just be throwing money away for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com