Pilots Prevent
August 17, 2021
In mid-August, UP sophomore Murphy Bradshaw was planning to take a trip to Seattle to celebrate her mom’s milestone birthday with family and friends. That’s when it hit her: Maybe she should take a COVID test.
“I work at Salt & Straw and the mask mandate had been wishy-washy for the past month,” she says. “I wanted to be careful and extra-sure because of the Delta variant.”
The highly contagious variant, and the fact that she had been working with the often maskless public in a busy shop, had her worried. She’d be devastated if she inadvertently spread COVID to her family and friends on the trip. “I’ve been vaccinated, and I didn’t have any symptoms, but I was like, maybe I could still have it and be contagious,” she says. “Plus, school is about to start, and I’ll be living in a house with six other people. I just wanted to be super careful, safe, and reassured.”
Amid packing and planning for the trip, just figuring out how to get a COVID test could have been a hurdle all on its own. She’d never had one before. There just hadn’t been a need. She spent her first year at UP taking classes remotely. She practiced social distancing, wore her mask in public spaces including work, was never exposed to anyone who had COVID, or had any symptoms.
But thankfully UP has made it super easy for employees and students to get a free self-administered COVID test kit through Campus Safety and the Heath and Counseling Center. And starting this week, students can get them from their residence halls too. Making sure members of the UP community have easy access to these test kits is just one way UP is helping to stop the spread of COVID. Anyone experiencing active symptoms should contact their health care provider or the HCC if they’re students. But when office hours are closed or you’re not symptomatic and just want to be sure, the kits are a great resource.
Bradshaw says the test was fast and easy. “There’s a website that you go to where you get connected with a real live person who will tell you what to do.” It’s proctored online by a health care professional, so you need a computer and webcam, but everything else you need is in the box (except for your nose of course, which is the part that gets swabbed).
Test takers are advised not to open the package until connected with the proctor, then they open it and show them the contents so they can make sure the items are all there and uncompromised. There’s the nose swab, a dropper bottle with solution, and a card with an area where you combine the two, and windows that show the results. There should automatically be one line in the Control window. If another line shows up in the Sample window the test is positive. If not, the test is negative. A faint line in the Sample window is inconclusive and means you must contact a health care provider for an in-office test.
“It was a step-by-step process and very thorough,” says Bradshaw. “There’s also a graphic telling you what to do on the screen — when to open the swab, how to do it. The only thing I found challenging was I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right. I put the swab pretty far up there and got really teary eyed. I figured that made it the most effective right?” she laughs. “The guy was like, ‘Are your eyes watering?’ ”
After swabbing her nose and putting the swab in the designated spot in the card, she only had to wait 15 minutes for the results. “You have to be on the call the whole time and they interpret the results for you,” she says. “It’s like a pregnancy test. One line is negative and two positive. Luckily for me, there was just one line.”
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