COVID-19 Testing Is a Holy Mess in Houston

“The city needed more testing, and in order to meet demand, we created our testing center,” Bloom Labs founder Abbas Khan told CNN on July 7. Khan said people were pulling up to the drive-up testing site in tears, overcome with relief at finally getting a test after trying and failing at other sites around the city. Free testing locations listed by Harris County—the third-largest county in the country, in which Houston is located smack in the middle—had been filling up within the first few minutes of the day.

Before Bloom Labs opened, an official website run by the state of Texas on which residents could previously sign up for tests had flashed a message to call for any availability and warned of long wait times. Bloom Labs seemed to be a godsend to residents who were stymied by limited testing on a state level. (Beyoncé has even had to intervene multiple times, offering free tests at pop-up locations around the city.)

But only two weeks after opening, Bloom Labs is suffering the same problem Texans have experienced throughout the recent, deadly uptick in cases: “In our first week serving you we have been overwhelmed by your response! Our lab is currently at maximum capacity and the Houston Drive through location is temporarily closed,” reads a message on their website.

The outbreak in Houston, predicted by some public health experts to be the city that could outdo New York City’s number of cases, continues to surge because of many factors, and primarily, a lack of meaningful intervention by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Federal officials have also threatened to pull funding from sites across Texas, despite the A dearth of testing availability and messy infrastructure in the state’s biggest city only contributes to the spread.

Even people who manage to get tests report waiting over two weeks to get results. Sometimes, results don’t come back at all, because labs in the U.S. do not have enough capacity to handle the sheer number of cases that the country’s lack of pandemic strategy has produced.

People in Houston told VICE they contacted multiple locations, including but not limited to county testing sites and Walmarts, before finding one with availability. Unlike in New York, where COVID-19 tests remain free through the state health department, testing throughout Texas is a patchwork system of public and private providers, none of which can keep up with demand, and all of which have their own systems for arranging appointments. The result is a confusing rigmarole over basic, vital healthcare that could directly improve the state’s staggering case number—if only people could access it.

Mary, a Houston resident who asked that her name be changed to protect her privacy, was finally able to track a test down on July 8 after three days of looking. Her son’s roommate tested positive, and her son and husband work together every day, so the whole family sought testing soon after learning of the roommate's diagnosis.

“I thought, I’ll look for a Harris County test, but I went to the Harris County website, and there were no tests available,” Mary said. “I went to CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart—same thing. [These were] all of the places that were supposed to have testing available, and none did.”

She ultimately went to an urgent care about 40 minutes away from her house (one of the problems unique to Houston is its sheer size, meaning the closest active testing site for someone who lives there may in fact be over an hour away from their home). After she got in line 15 minutes before opening, healthcare providers ran through a series of questions to determine her eligibility for a test. The new county-run website, texas.curative inc.com, which replaced the now-defunct txcovidtest.org, automates this process by quizzing users on symptoms, pre-existing conditions, and recent travel. Those who meet certain criteria are directed to book a test appointment. After Mary was tested, she headed home, where she’s currently self-quarantined and still awaiting her results.

The test result turnaround issue isn’t unique to Texas. Quest Diagnostics, which operates labs nationwide and throughout Houston, recently attributed their average turnaround time of seven-plus days to soaring demand for tests, “particularly in the South, Southwest and West regions of the country.”

LabCorp, another medical testing company, similarly said testing capacity is under strain due to outbreaks in the South and West. As cases soar in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and more than a dozen other states, labs can’t return results quickly enough.

Claire, a 25-year-old whose last name was omitted for privacy, spent a night and a day seeking a COVID test in late June after a friend tested positive. “[My] friend was under the impression that if she didn’t get results back in a certain window of time, her result was negative,” Claire said. Like countless other Houstonians, Clarie’s friend didn’t get results back until long after the quoted window of four to six days, and assumed hearing nothing meant she wasn’t positive for COVID-19.

Claire first tried finding a free test site on the Harris County health website, but saw the same message Mary had—no more tests available. She drove somewhere for a walk-in test and was turned away, went back home, and called urgent cares and clinics around the city. “Most places were saying, ‘Call back at 7 or 8 a.m., we open up spots at that time,’” she said. “It was a total clusterfuck; it was a nightmare.”

She ended up getting on a waiting list at an urgent care that her friend had gone to, which promised to text within eight to 12 hours if she could get a less-reliable rapid test. She also scheduled a standard test through United Methodist Medical Center for 2:10 p.m. at a location across town.

“I live in Montrose, so I drove 35 minutes out to Spring, got there five minutes after two, and waited in my car for over two hours,” Claire said. She got her negative test result 18 days later.

Syd, a 21-year-old Houston resident whose last name was also omitted for privacy, has been tested in Houston three times since March, when the pandemic first started rolling through the city. The first two times, in mid-March and late June, they got a test at a drive-through, city-run site at Butler Stadium, a high school football arena. They said there was no line—just an empty parking lot filled with a maze of traffic cones. Syd worked at a restaurant in Houston (recently closed), and, by late June—per the Governor’s unwieldy reopening plan—75 percent of the seats were filled with diners who only occasionally wore masks. Syd’s job as a host involved taking the temperature of everyone who came in, getting much closer than six feet.

A few co-workers started displaying symptoms, but Syd’s test in late June at the football stadium came back negative. Within a week, Syd was coughing and had a fever. The Butler Stadium location had a line of cars snaking down Highway 90. Syd turned to an urgent care in the hopes of a faster result. That was July 1, and they still haven’t gotten results. The practitioner who saw Syd confirmed they had a textbook case of coronavirus for a person in their 20s and said to quarantine and watch for a high fever and chest pains—signs to go to the emergency room in the overflowing Texas Medical Center.

“Multiple times, I’ve called the urgent care to get my results, and they said that they won’t give them to me over the phone and I have to go in person to get them,” Syd said. “This was while I was symptomatic of COVID. I haven’t been able to leave [quarantine] yet to get them. A guy I talked to on the phone said I was maybe the sixth or seventh caller who’d been waiting more than 10 days for results back.”

Five days later, Syd, who’s asthmatic, saw blood in their urine, was having chest pains, and had a fever over 102 degrees. Their partner drove them to the emergency room, where Syd was given antibiotics for a severe bladder and kidney infection—a likely result of their body’s response to fighting coronavirus.

“By the time I was in the emergency room, they told me I definitely had COVID, but it wasn’t going to be detectable anymore because I’d been symptomatic for too long [and] the viral load was too low,” Syd said. “I definitely have it—and I have no positive test to show for it, because Houston is melting down, essentially.”

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