CVS Covid Test Worse Than No Test at All

I was pretty sure I had Covid on Saturday, July 11, but the first test I could schedule was at a CVS Pharmacy July 13. The next best time was July 14 at Complete Health Partners, an emergency medical clinic nearby. I scheduled them both out of caution and self-isolated myself in an upstairs bedroom. 

Very oddly, I thought, the CVS pre-screening form asked me if I had been to Wuhan, China in the past two weeks.  Something told me they might be a bit behind the curve on what's happening with Covid-19.

Scheduling both tests proved to be a good call.  When I followed the signs at CVS to the drive-in window around back, a clerk inside greeted me from behind a closed window, read from her script, and dispensed me out a bag with testing collection materials: a ziplock bag, a small vial, and 4 regular Q-tip swabs. 

She continued reading from her script as I followed her directions the best I could to gather a nasal sample, all the while sweating and shaking and feeling awful. 

Both nostrils. Pull lid from vial, place swab into vial, and reseal. Put in ziplock and drop in Deposit Box on side of building.  She didn't even take my temperature.

I had a real test the following day at Complete Health Partners and waited three days during the height of my illness for the results (I found out later that I could have had my results in a half-hour if I had paid $350 on top of my insurance payment). 

Three days later I was entirely NOT surprised by the positive reading on the Covid test. The previous 72 hours days had been hellish, with severe headaches, chills, fever, night sweats, nausea, skin rash, and mental fogginess. 

And I was not surprised when I did not hear any test results from CVS.  Until today, that is, July 26, now 13 days after the test. 

A chipper young woman with CVS informed me that the labs were backed up, but I need not worry anymore because my Covid test came back NEGATIVE!

Even while I was offering an extended verbal review of CVS's Covid bullshit "self-test" on the phone, I knew I was going to have to write about this.

I checked online for any information on the CVS's bogus test, and as I did so, I remembered the CVS exec with Donald Trump announcing plans for Covid tests that would be conducted in CVS parking lots.  When I went to CVS, in fact, that's what I thought I would be getting, instead of a q-tip and a test tube in a bag.

Then it came back to me, something I read a couple of years ago about CVS's political connections with the Trump Administration. I quickly found at Snopes.com that

CVS corporate and its associated PAC contributed $535,000 in donations in 2017 to political organizations that support Trump,

and that Trump is the only presidential candidate that CVS has supported since 2016.

Enough said.