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Comment by ftzay | Hacker News Reader

Your parents are smart. Hospitals are a prime spreading location and testing centers are often crowded. Also, an overworked nurse may make mistakes in testing centers and slip up on hygiene rules.

The situation is similar in Europe, actually. Including loss of trust.

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Everyone talks so much shit on USA car culture but our testing centers are typically a drive thru where patients are isolated in their cars thereby protecting everyone. Patients swab themselves and then hand the sample over through a few inch opening in the window.

In India - at least in the cities - you don't even need to step out for a Covid test. You can request a technician to come and collect your sample from the comfort of your home, and you'll get the result in a few hours or the next day at most. I'm not sure where the commenter's parents live, but if they live even in a moderate-sized city, they're being unnecessarily paranoid.

Thanks for bringing this up. I will check whether such a facility exists in the village where my parents live. If you’re curious, they live in Srirangam, Trichy, TamilNadu.

A lot of testing centers / labs such as Lister or Thyrocare can do in person sample collections, such as this one below are available.

Its quite easy to get a test done at home. (Mentioned of lister metropolis because they had come home for some other sample collection and mentioned of this) . You can check aggregator apps as well that provide this list.

https://www.metropolisindia.com/parameter/trichy/covid-19-rt...

> If you’re curious, they live in Srirangam, Trichy, TamilNadu

Wonderful place, except for the heat :-). I've visited there (for the temples) on a few occasions.

So many downsides to that.. how do you get tested if you dont have a car? How do you drive a car when you are very sick? How do you make sure properly do the test on themselves?

Sorry, but I dont find this a good argument in favor of a car-culture at all.

It's not a theoretical harm, either.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-07/op-ed-drive...

> For each walk-up site, we looked at how many people live within a mile radius and could conceivably walk to the site. You don’t need to look at a map to know that too many people and places are left behind. If you don’t have a car but live in South Los Angeles, chances are you can find a nearby walk-up test site. But if you’re carless in East L.A., there is not a single walk-up option in your community. The entire San Fernando Valley — with a population of almost 2 million — received its first and only walk-up site, in Arleta, in late June.

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-yorkers-without-a-car-ar...

> After trekking nearly two hours on public transit to get to the testing site in Flatbush, a neighborhood in New York's Brooklyn borough, the 30-year-old taproom manager was surprised to discover a line of cars snaking around the address instead of a line of people. McGrath, who does not own a car, approached a state trooper at the testing site to confirm his suspicions that a vehicle was required to be tested.

> "I walk up to one of the state troopers and he says, 'You can't walk in, you have to have a car,'" McGrath told Business Insider, adding that it appeared as though he was not the first New Yorker to arrive at the testing site on foot.

And here I was thinking that Germany was car-centric... anecdotal evidence, but in my small town there is a testing site in a pharmacy a few hundred meters from my home, and I couldn't imagine that you would have trouble finding a testing site accessible by foot or public transport in larger cities.

I have gotten so many covid tests in the past two years. Some of them are drive thru only but most don't care either way. In DTLA proper the testing centers are mostly for pedestrians.

Consider the possibility that your experiences aren't universal.

I cited specific examples of people having trouble getting tested without a car.

Having a car is not a requirement to get tested. It has made it really easy to get tested though. For what it’s worth, this isn’t our idea as a nation. Korea was doing it before us.

The drive through testing really does offload a lot of stress that would otherwise be placed on physicians and pharmacies. The logistics are a huge win. Locally we’ve had unoccupied parking structures used to house the tests. Even without that you basically just need a parking lot, a couple tents, and a restroom.

If you’re so sick you can’t drive you can have DoorDash or any other delivery service send you an at home test. If you’re too sick for that, you probably should call for medical services and not an antigen test.

I’m in Georgia, which has not offered any support for people during the pandemic beyond what the Federal government provided, and it’s pretty easy to get a test due to the efforts of private companies. If you don’t have a car you can often walk up provided there is a sidewalk. We also have testing available in every chain pharmacy and in dedicated facilities that have sprung up in unoccupied mall space or buildings used by bank branches and fast food establishments that are vacant.

You walk. That’s what they did in SF. One lane for cars, one for pedestrians.

I rode my scooter through the CVS drive through for a test this weekend to get tested. It's really not an issue.

Here in Thailand I can walk into 7-11 and buy a rapid antigen test for $3 and go take it at home

Same in Germany.

The testing centers are free for the most part.

Driving to a testing center and sitting in your car could easily use $3 in gas and more of your time. 7-11 is absolutely everywhere here, you don't understand the level of convenience.

I'm in my condo right now, I could go to a 7-11, come back and have my result all within 10 minutes for $3. But yeah car culture in America is great

This isn't the typical scenario in the Bay Area where testing centers are walk-in vs. drive through. To ensure testing consistency, swabbing is done by a healthcare worker (e.g., nurse) not by the person being tested. This is my experience across 4-counties here, San Francisco city included.

Net-net, COVID-testing privacy isn't a laudable consequence of the US's car culture, at least not everywhere in the US.

I know of at least 1 drive-through testing center, at the San Jose Fairgrounds. There may be more, but not sure.

Though there the testers/nurse puts the swab in the nose.

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

You’re equating cars with drunk driving?

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