![]() In the pre-holiday rush, the operator at a Crestview Clinical Laboratory site on Wilshire Boulevard, who wouldn’t give her name to a reporter, said she also provided a VIP service from another testing company for people willing to pay extra for rapid PCR tests. In some places, testing sites run by the same company were clustered within easy walking distance of one another. The sites were also ubiquitous in Los Angeles. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG) Governor Gavin Newsom visited the testing site in south Los Angeles County to highlight his COVID-19 Emergency Response Package. Nurses don PPG at a COVID-19 mobile testing site at Paramount Park in Paramount, CA Wednesday, January 12, 2022. Some vans and tents are clearly marked with company names, while others are operating out of what appear to be rental vans. Leading up to the holidays, people stood in long lines in the cold waiting to be swabbed. It’s hard to walk down a street in some parts of Manhattan without running into at least one or two of the pop-up sites. She said consumers should contact Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office if they are concerned about fraud or criminal activity at testing sites. Melaney Arnold, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health, said state officials “are aware of complaints for various testing locations across the state” and are investigating. “Guidance needs to be coming from the state and regulated at the public health level.” “I don’t think we can put this on the public to know” which sites are legitimate, Bloomgarden said. Unfortunately, telling the good from the bad is not always easy. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)Ĭonsumers seeking testing - either a rapid antigen test that provides results in under an hour or a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test that generally takes longer but is more accurate - may think all testing sites are created equal, but they’re not. “It’s not a surprise that these conditions were totally ripe for consumers to be gouged and to get fraudulent tests.” People get COVID-19 tests at a mobile testing site at Paramount Park in Paramount, CA Wednesday, January 12, 2022. “These conditions change so rapidly,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security who leads the COVID-19 Testing Toolkit, which provides guidance to employers and others. And they are sounding the alarm that by visiting the pop-up industry’s sometimes makeshift tents, desperate patients could be putting their health, wallets and personal data at risk. ![]() High demand and scarce supply opened the door to bad actors, and officials in some states are having a hard time keeping up their oversight amid the proliferation. Some of the sites run by private companies offer legitimate, timely and reliable results, but others are more like weeds. In recent months, mobile COVID-19 testing tents and vans have sprouted on urban sidewalks and street curbs as demand has skyrocketed in response to the rapid spread of the omicron variant.
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