Hilton Head coronavirus testing events come with side effect: A long wait for results
Sarah Fischer wasn’t feeling well when she decided to get tested for COVID-19 at the June 24 free testing event at Hilton Head High School.
But a week later, she still didn’t know if she had the virus.
She’d spent the entire week home and did not go to her job at a resort on Hilton Head Island. She was cooped up in her bedroom and staying away from her roommate to keep everyone safe.
On Thursday morning, she finally got the call — she didn’t have COVID-19.
Julia Esteves, a Hardeeville 17-year-old who works as a restaurant hostess, was in the same boat.
She got tested at the same event after two people she knew tested positive for the virus. Esteves stayed home and took extra care to stay away from her grandmother, who lives with her family.
After eight days of anxiously waiting, Esteves found out Thursday morning that she was negative, too.
About 900 people were tested for the coronavirus at the free event with the expectation that they’d isolate for a few days — until they received their results.
Instead, the process dragged on for over a week for some people, leading to day after day inside, lost hours at work and canceled trips to see family.
Labs overwhelmed by COVID tests
The June 24 event was the island’s first state-sponsored free testing opportunity, and it was largely hailed as a success. People who got tested didn’t need an appointment or a doctors’ note — two obstacles that had stopped some people from getting tested for COVID-19.
Cars wrapped around the high school parking lot for hours as people who worked in the service and hospitality industries, retirees and visitors alike got tested.
The samples were tested at a state lab, and the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control aimed for a 48-hour turnaround. But the downside of the massive testing efforts appear to be a massive testing backlog, according to event organizers and the people who put their lives on hold to wait for results.
S.C. Sen. Tom Davis (R-Beaufort), who organized the event and the preceding Monday free testing event, said the tests are “exhausting lab capacity,” but said he hopes labs will soon be able to test more samples at a time.
That’s welcome news for people who attended Monday’s testing event, where over 1,500 people were tested. On Thursday, two Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette reporters who were tested had not received their results
‘If we’d known’
As testing becomes more available — Davis is pushing for weekly free testing events throughout the summer — the ability to turn around results appears to be the bottleneck. Beaufort County residents trying to do what’s right by quarantining become frustrated with the amount of time it takes to know whether they’re positive or negative.
State health officials estimate that Beaufort County could have up to 8,115 additional cases of the coronavirus on top of the 1,321 confirmed cases reported Thursday. Their reasoning is that lack of testing can lead to asymptomatic people who don’t know they’re carrying the virus.
Scott Sealy, who lives in Bluffton, was tested at the Wednesday testing event, too. After waiting for a week for his results, he decided to see a doctor and be tested once again in a private lab.
The afternoon before he was scheduled get the test again, DHEC called with his results from the June 24 test. He was negative.
“If we knew it was actually going to take that long and there was a way that we could have gotten faster results, we would have opted for that route,” said his wife, Lisa. “He could have been back at work sooner, and we all could have been at ease if we had known.”
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 4:18 PM.
