The afternoon we drive through a mobile COVID testing site
After protesting in Boston against police brutality and the unjust justice system in this country, we do the only sensible thing to do: We get tested for COVID-19.
The night of the protest, we take every reasonable precaution we can take, but—just as with pregnancy—the only 100% effective contraceptive is abstinence, and we certainly did not abstain from standing up with 40,000 others downtown.
We want to be able to say with certainty to those whom we know and love that we aren’t COVID-positive.
While protesting, we wore our extreme masks (that ones that we had gotten for India—which seems like a dozen lifetimes ago now), but we were around plenty of other compatriots, and while we could maintain a decent social distance while marching, while we listened to the speeches at the end of the march we were shoulder-to-shoulder with others in front of the State House. Better to get tested and to know our status. As it is always.
Luckily where we live—Malden—is providing free testing for residents. No insurance, no questions asked. Cambridge Health Alliance is providing free testing for residents of Revere, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Medford, Somerville, Cambridge, and Winthrop (which is a good idea, since Revere, Chelsea, Everett…and Malden have some of the highest positivity rates in the state, even three months later…).
Monday Matthias is still riding his post-protest high. We consume a lot of media about the protests taking place not only across the country, but across the world, and we talk excitedly with each other about it. We debrief, we walk ourselves back through our timeline. We comment, we critique. We are amped up and we are processing.
Tuesday morning, once we have come down a little bit, we call up the local testing site, which is less than a mile from our house. We have to call separately; Matthias calls first.
Someone answers, then hangs up on him when he responds.
But the second woman takes his call. They have appointments open almost immediately, and we make one for later in the afternoon, in an hour I have free from meetings.
I call second, and they ask me race and demographic information, which they hadn’t asked Matthias. They also ask me insurance information, even though none is required. I answer and make an appointment at the same time as his.
‘Wear a mask and bring ID,’ she tells me .
Five minutes before our appointment, I set an out-of-office Slack status and we pile into the car—with our masks, of course.
There is, obviously, somehow more traffic than during rush hour in the before times, despite the fact that it is the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
We cruise down the road by the testing site and follow the signs. There are two lanes formed by tall orange cones at the site; there is a mobile pharmacy with pickup which has a line, but we’re the only car in the second mobile testing line. We talk with healthcare workers who are stationed along the route and follow their directions: Windows up, hold up your IDs to the glass so they can read them.
A woman in a white hazmat suit comes out of a trailer, and Mathias passes me his ID so I can hold it up to the window alongside mine. She marks these down and returns to the trailer for a few minutes, before re-emerging with two plastic bags marked with big orange biohazard stickers. She slips two pieces of paper through the tiniest crack that I can manage in the window, and tucks the biohazard bags under our respective windshield wipers.
She motions for me to crack the window again, which I do, and tells us to pull up to the group of healthcare workers directly in front of us, who are in white hazmat suits that match hers. I pull up.
I’ve set my phone in our phone holder to record the process. A white woman takes Matthias’s test bag from his windshield wipers and starts to explain the process to him through his lowered window. A Black man comes up to my window and motions to me to lower the window.
‘Do you mind if I record this?’ I ask him, and he chuckles in response. ‘Sure, no problem,’ he laughs.
I turn on my video and roll down my window.
I don’t mind the process really, but Matthias is really suffering. I focus—as I always do during uncomfortable times—on my breath, that simple little thing that you can always control, if only you try hard enough. The nasal swab can’t be described as comfortable, but it’s more of a minor inconvenience.
Matthias does not have the same experience: He coughs and his eyes tear up. Once his test is done, he’s sniffling and he’s trying to gather himself together.
‘I couldn’t drive right now,’ he tells me as I smile and pull the car forward once we’re done, sent home with expectations set and a small pamphlet about what we can expect next.
‘Pole, baby’ I tell him, unsure of how I can help him.
We head home with ten minutes to spare before my next meeting, for which I can comfortably set up.
It was all very surreal—workers in white hazmat suits like the set of X-Files, biohazard bags that somehow belonged to us—but so much of right now is surreal: we are all at home, unemployed, pandemic-stricken, protesting in our streets. You just take each day one step at a time, each week one day at a time.
We’re told to call back in three days—Friday—but on Thursday afternoon Matthias’s phone rings. A few minutes later, I get the same call.
‘Hi, I’m calling with your COVID test results,’ the woman on the other end of the line tells me.
‘OK,’ I respond nervously, unsure of how to respond.
‘You’re negative,’ she tells me.
‘OK, thank you—good luck out there,’ I tell her awkwardly before we hang up.
I’m grateful for a lot of things right now, including the fact that we can comfortably and intelligently exercise our right to assemble—to protest—in a way that mitigated our risk of contracting this virus.
I’m not sure when we’ll be out protesting again, and I’m disheartened that there’s an important reason to—that we still have to protest this bullshit—but I’m a little more confident that when we do, we’ll be able to continue to do so safely.