By: Pat Austin
SHREVEPORT – One of the benefits of retiring from the classroom is that I no longer pay attention to the hysterical headlines about Covid, whether there will be another national shutdown, how high the case count is, and what the spread rate among school children may be.
I don’t pay attention to any of it. I don’t read it.
So, that being said, I may be a bit behind the curve on what’s what in Covidland.
What I do know is this: my and my spouse both had Covid in January last year. It wasn’t fun. But hey! Natural immunity!
And call us sheep if you must, be we both opted to be vaxxed and boosted, but that’s our own personal choice and I think that’s how it should be. Personal choice, like a flu shot.
There’s been a Covid outbreak at our church in the past couple of weeks; that is, several people have tested positive. Everyone is doing fine, nothing to worry about, but today my husband thought maybe he should get tested. He’d been directly exposed and has been feeling a bit under the weather for a couple of days.
We went to Ochsner Quick Care so he could get tested. This is where we both went last year in January and at that time we were in and out quickly. Today, it was going to be a two hour wait for a test.
Seriously?!
We went across the street to a Velocity Care and it was a three hour wait there.
He said never mind, came home, and decided to just self-monitor and self-isolate if necessary. He felt well enough to get out and do his daily three mile walk so I guess all is well.
But my question is why in the world at this point in this pandemic are we having to wait two and three hours for a nasal swab?! I’ve seen people posting do-it-yourself swab tests but there are none to be found around here and even if you could they’re at least $30.
Something is just upside down it seems to me.
I can’t bear these polarized discussions about Covid; that’s not my point here. I know people who have died from Covid, some with comorbidities and some not. (Those with comorbidities, by the way, were living just fine with diabetes or COPD until Covid got them). The politicizing of the pandemic has been absurd, if you ask me, and caused much more harm that ever should have been the case.
Anyway, not to tread those waters, but I would be interested in knowing why it’s so damn hard to get a test now, two years into this pandemic and when this is supposedly basically a harmless variant.
I was happier in my oblivion.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 
There is a Covid testing station set up in the parking lot of the Senior Citizen Center about half a mile up the street from our house. You need an appointment to get tested. We drive up that street several times a week. For the last three weeks or so (since before Christmas), every time we do there has been a long line of cars with people waiting to get tested. I mean over 50 cars lined up on the side of the road all the time. I glance at the people in the cars when I can, and the overwhelming majority of the people seem to be millennial aged, and mostly female. Not the elderly with co-morbidities that you mentioned in your post.
At first I thought that it was people getting tested so they could travel over the Holidays, or something, but it has kept up into January. I’m not quite sure why you would want to wait in line for an hour or two in cold weather sitting in your car staring at your phone waiting to get tested for a virus that causes a cold (since that is what Omicron variant is). But there you go.
I read a meme somewhere that said that the fastest way to end the Covid pandemic is to put down your newspaper and turn off the TV news. I believe it.