All over the place, pop-up COVID-19 testing locations offering fast results are popping up. Are they reliable?
Inside Edition discovered that there were pop-ups in New York City using vans as rental vehicles. One advertisement “express results in 8 to 24 hours.”
The producer was swabbed but no results were found after 24 hours. We waited three days before we got any results. So we decided to go and try to get answers.
“He had his test on Monday, and we still haven’t gotten results yet,” Inside Edition senior correspondent Les Trent told a manager.
“The lab is so busy,”The manager responds
He said that all they do is to collect samples. As to what happens next — that’s the lab’s responsibility.
Brooklyn is the location of the lab. Inside Edition called them multiple times, but they could not provide us with our results after just five days.
A supervisor for the lab wouldn’t go on camera, but said they are not trying to mislead anyone and are just simply overwhelmed by the Omicron surge.
Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of public health at USC, says that pop-ups shouldn’t take samples from people whose labs are unable to provide reliable results within a reasonable time.
“If they can’t give you the test results within 24 hours, no more than 48 hours, that would be a big red flag for me,”Klausner.
Epidemiologist Dr. Danielle Ompad, a professor at NYU, agrees.
“It’s absolutely not acceptable that an organization is advertising one time frame for test results and having tests come back longer,”Ompad said.