PUBLISHED JULY 21, 2020
Adventures in pandemic-land continue. First off, I am happy to report that all staff members are healthy. We continue to take and record our temperatures and to answer health-related questionnaires daily. That rules out symptomatic infections among staff. As for the possibility of asymptomatic infections, who knows? The only sure answer would come through periodic testing. But now, 4+ months into this pandemic, widespread testing is still elusive.
On July 7, the county health department wrote to all restaurants: “The new ‘testing cadence’ from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services recommends anyone working in public-facing positions (restaurants, retail, etc.) to be tested every two weeks.” A number of testing sites were listed, including St. Joseph Mercy, Packard Health, CVS, Rite Aid, and others We committed ourselves to following those recommendations, starting with sending our managers to get tested.
One week later, I reported back to the health department: One of our managers was having difficulty getting tested. It turned out that most sites required appointments, and some were not taking appointments at all because they were already scheduled too far out into the future. Other sites would not test asymptomatic workers. Our manager finally ended up getting tested at Packard Health five days ago. He waited for 2 hours in a line of cars for the drive-through test -- and has still not received his results.
Our health department rep responded by saying that some sites were having trouble getting testing materials, so had less availability than usual. They were also hearing about longer turnaround times for results.
On July 16, I wrote to the health department: “Do you know if anything is in the works to make testing more widely available? We want to follow recommendations and get our staff members tested every two weeks, but that prospect seems very difficult in the current situation.”
They wrote: “We are hearing of more and more of limitations in terms of location, delays in results and are working each and every day to set up additional clinics, pop up clinics, etc. However, there are some larger limitations outside of our control in terms of testing supplies and lab capacity. As supplies become limited, it is more likely that staff who have no known COVID exposure, do not have symptoms and are just trying to get routinely tested will be turned down for testing to reserve it for people with known close contact to a case, people who are symptomatic and people who may work in direct patient care.”
OK. Test; don’t test.
As is typically the case these days, what happens locally provides a glimpse into what is happening nationally.
Reading the New York Times two days later, I came upon the story “Trump Proposes Draining Billions from Next Relief Bill.” My “aha” moment: “In talks over the weekend, administration officials … pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nation’s top health agencies.”
And equally appalling, though not 100% relevant: “Suggestions from the administration… included funding priorities unrelated to the spread of the coronavirus, including constructing a new building for the FBI… The administration also suggested eliminating a proposed $2 billion allocated to the Indian Health Service, which is responsible for providing medical care to more than half of the nation’s tribal citizens and Alaska Natives, who have been devastated by the pandemic and are particularly vulnerable to the virus.”
Then in the July 20th New York Times appeared the story “Delays From Testing Backlogs May Cloud Ture Spread of Coronavirus.”
It began: “As demand for coronavirus testing surges around the nation, laboratories that process samples are again experiencing backlogs that have left anxious patients and their doctors waiting days—sometimes a week or more—for results.
“At the city and state levels, testing delays could mask persistent rises in case numbers and could cloud ways to combat the coronavirus, as health officials continue to find themselves one step behind the virus’s rapid and often silent spread, experts said.”
Yup. That sounds about right.
So, to recap, we have:
Soaring coronavirus numbers
Limited testing supplies
Long wait times for results
A growing presence of federal police in major cities (I know, not corona related, but so disturbing I had to mention it)
A weakening of the CDC and its ability to collect data
A general fear and anxiety about what comes next
And, for us at Detroit Street Filling Station, significant hurdles to following the health department’s “testing cadence” guidelines.
Tying the strings together, as he often does, was Charles Blow, with the NYT column: “Where is the Outrage?” (Right here, Charles.)
Blow wrote about the climbing number of cases, the administration’s dissing of Dr. Fauci, the lack of testing, the insistence that schools reopen in the fall, the elimination of funds for the Indian Health Service, immigration facilities where COVID is raging, Trump’s efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act, the US’ impending withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and the removal of the CDC from the information loop.
Blow ends his piece with: “How is this happening? How is it being allowed to happen? Real people, Americans, are being allowed to get sick and die while Trump plays a political game. How long can this continue?”
Amen.