Similarly, there's been an increase in helicopter traffic in Western New York. But, we do know why. It's Canadian snowbirds trying to skip the border shutdown to head to Florida https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/local/canadians-buzz-throu...
The US is currently well ahead of Canada in per-capita COVID delivery.
The US is actually well ahead of most of the world, especially when you factor population and geography [1]. Sure, Israel has crushed everyone, but I think we can all agree there are exceptional circumstances which make this easier in Israel than in most other countries. Other success stories have been largely small, wealthy countries.
It's a shame that the US media is so politicized as to not recognize Operation Warp Speed and the men and women - from researchers, to logisticians, to clinicians - who have made this possible. It has been an absolute miracle of human achievement and will hopefully be celebrated by historians, since the current generation refuses to do so.
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This is why the helicopter flights are so popular. They're literally just flying across the border with the shortest possible thing that could be called a flight, because air travel is allowed. And they're getting their car (or more often, RV) towed across the border, because cross-border towing is also allowed. The shortest possible flight means the shortest possible tow.
There’s an upper limit to testing capacity, and optimistically the government allocates that capacity in the way it thinks it will do the most good.
They’re worried about processing tests from care homes, healthcare workers, suspected positive patients, outbreaks, etc... not old people that want to go to Florida for vacation.
But that doesn’t preclude finding a private company that will test you, but the government isn’t going to pay for non-medically-necessary medical treatment and testing from a private company.
Went online and scheduled an appointment for an hour later. (They had sooner, but I took that one.) Drive through test. Just had to provide my usual identification for healthcare (provincial health card), but there was no screening as far as whether I really needed it since the labs aren't really backed up right now.
About 20 hours later got a text with the result in the middle of the night.
From "Maybe I have covid?" to getting a PCR test result was 21 hours and $0. A antigen test would only take an hour or two, but be much less accurate. As far as PCR testing, no complaints here. Only had to spend one night sleeping on the couch in the basement before knowing I wasn't going to infect and kill my family.
Most countries that require Covid tests before travel require a PCR test for that reason.