Adventure #2: How we traveled 6,700 miles for COVID tests (Part 1)

When we entered this year, heading to Seoul in the midst of a global pandemic was not on our list of things to do. Multiple times over the past several months, Peter and I looked at each other and said, “we’re crazy, right?” And we probably are. However, it’s not necessarily because we chose to live in South Korea during these COVID times.

According to Worldometer, as of August 3, the United States is reporting 4,813,647 total cases of the novel coronavirus, about 26% of the cases in the world. By contrast, South Korea on this date is reporting 14,389 confirmed cases, about .0008% of cases worldwide. This despite the U.S. and South Korea each citing its first case of imported COVID-19 on January 20, 2020. Our World in Data reports that the U.S. and South Korea each have a policy of “open public testing,” including for asymptomatic persons. However, our anecdotal experience has suggested that the policies of the two countries are substantially different.

When we realized in June of this year that we might actually get visas to come to Korea, we began planning a visit to our families in Virginia prior to our departure. I wanted to leave my job at the hospital at least 10 days before we expected to visit so that we could socially isolate. I also thought that as a healthcare worker expecting to visit older relatives in another state, it would be most responsible to get tested for COVID-19 before traveling.

We did our due diligence, researching how and where to get tested in Philadelphia. We spoke with our health insurance carrier more than once to ensure that testing would be paid for. In doing so, we discovered that our Independence Blue Cross plan would pay for COVID testing only if we had a physician’s prescription for the lab test. We both visited our primary care physician (PCP) and were able to obtain prescriptions easily. Two different PCPs reassured us that our health system’s testing centers were obtaining test results quickly and would have no problem testing us. We called to set up the appointments and completed multiple screening processes explaining that we had no symptoms but wanted to be tested before traveling.

At the appointed time, we arrived at the drive-through testing center and… that’s where it all broke down. When asked what symptoms we had, we explained that we had none, and the reasons we wanted to get tested. We were told that this center was doing no tests of asymptomatic people. Our explanations made no difference at all. A supervisor came out to speak with us and provided the startling piece of misinformation that “if you’re asymptomatic the test will be negative anyway.”

According to the CDC on July 22, 2020, “viral testing of workers without symptoms may be useful to detect COVID-19 early and stop transmission quickly… . ” The UK’s Office of National Statistics reported in early July that only 22% of people who tested positive for coronavirus in one UK study reported having symptoms on the day of their test.

Despite having facts on our side, despite having a physician’s prescription, and despite my being a healthcare worker who had been directly exposed to patients with COVID-19, we were denied testing on the grounds that we were asymptomatic. Having no time to make other arrangements for testing before leaving for Virginia, we took our chances and went to see our families anyway, taking as many reasonable precautions as we could while visiting. So much for the U.S. policy of “open public testing.”

As you will read in Part 2, our experience of South Korea’s testing policy was very different.