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.
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