Home COVID Test

[Martin Hash]

Amongst our junk mail was a small package to my wife, Gwynne. When I handed the bubble-wrap envelop to her, eyebrows raised, she said, “It’s home COVID tests. Every household can have a box.”
“What are we going to do with home COVID tests?”
Gwynne shrugged. She had other considerations: we’d bought online tickets to go see one of our favorite dance bands, and she was fiddling around on her phone to download them.
“Oh,” she said a little louder than her talking voice: that’s a signal that I should ask, “What?”
“We have to be vaccinated,” she answered.
“What?” I repeated.
“Yeah, it’s Portland.”
“Did it say that when you bought the tickets?”
“No.”
“I guess we can’t go. Is there a number to call to get our money back?”
Gwynne studied her phone a bit more: “It says that we can use a recent COVID test.”
My eyes popped open and looked at the package on the kitchen counter near Gwynne: she looked down at it too.
I picked it up and opened it. Inside were 6 sets of tests and an instruction card that said to download an app. That done, we followed the directions on our phones: swab nostrils, swish around in vial, put drops into plastic test device, wait for timer, report results. Unsurprisingly, neither of us had COVID.

Home COVID Test.jpg

Holding the plastic device, I commented: “That seems rather insecure. Do we give this thing to the person checking at the door? Do we show them our self-reported results on our phones?”
Gwynne didn’t know either. “Everybody in Portland must be vaxxed,” she suggested.
I went into my office and got my medical license: the first time I’d ever even put it in my wallet: “Maybe if Dr. Hash says so, they’ll take it?”
Driving over to the venue, I didn’t care either way: whether we went dancing or not, I was still going to write about this crazy exercise, but it turned out that nobody even asked: in fact, hardly anyone wore masks. It was a complete farce just like the whole shamdemic has been from the beginning.
A few days later, some friends of ours asked if we wanted tickets to go dancing in Portland. First thing Gwynne did was look at the ticket webpage: she read to me that they required the jab and wouldn’t accept home COVID test results.

Home COVID Test Results.png