COVID-19 Community Based Testing Centre

COVID-19 Testing Station
**April 2020 **
By James Littlewood

The Prime Minister had given a press conference, coronavirus was upon us and the whole country was headed for lockdown. People around me hit the stores and stocked up on God-knows-what. Those inclined to shoot things bought all the ammo they could. And I suddenly realised the sim-card trapped inside a broken cell phone would remain locked up inside a fixit shop for the indefinite future unless I conducted a rescue in the rapidly closing window. Like a man dispatched on a holy mission, I got in the car and made for Lincoln Rd.

There’s nothing nice about this neighbourhood. In fact, it’s not a neighbourhood, unless an entire post-code of big-box retailers and a hospital, sparsely punctuated with fast food franchises, mechanics and warehouses counts as such. It’s a double carraige-way with lots of traffic lights and parking lots the size of football fields; a single one could engulf most normal sized suburbs.

I suppose all cities have them. Hamilton’s got almost nothing else. Bits of the Hutt Valley abound in them. Perhaps the South Island has remained immune. Certainly, Auckland has more than its fair share: Wairau Park, Hurstmere Rd, Botany Town Centre: like zombie economies, they seem to feed off urban sprawl even as they sustain it. These places present the coal face of consumerism. Everything wrong with our society seems to thrive there.

Tucked in amidst all this are my fixit go-toes, the guys at Techexpert on the corner of Lincoln Rd and Moselle Ave, slotted in between Sal’s Pizza and a Pita Pit. Normally, it’s easy. They’ve even got a shared car park out the back. But it seemed everyone had the same idea, causing total gridlock for blocks and blocks. It felt like that disaster movie scenario where all of LA hits the freeway at once beneath fires in the sky, except there was no fire. Just a thousand angry radio-jocks breathing panic into a million drivers’ ears.

And then I was prevented from entering Mozelle Ave. Not because of gridlock. But because there was a cop’s ute blocking the road with lights ablaze and a road sign: “road closed”. Foul words embarrassed my lips.

I parked the car and strode out. I realised that not all cars were blocked from entering the street, only those turning left (I’d been turning right: more foul words). There were cops everywhere. Business owners were erecting barriers, and more cops were assisting them. Following the PM’s announcement, I’d been expecting The Quiet Earth. But this looked more like Sleeping Dogs.

And then I saw the flags. Garish poster colours pronouncing “Testing Centre: COVID-19”. Somewhere down a featureless driveway surrounded by the back ends of light industrial buildings, a squad of medics, PPE’d to the eyeballs (literally: they wore goggles) was taking swabs, without people needing to leave their own cars. More people were wrangling paperwork with the people still in the car queue. More cops wandered around, trying to look useful and God only knows what madness might arise in their absence.

I thought for a moment, why don’t the cops just bust the coronaviruses? Stick them in the cop cells overnight? Lock them up for good? Then I panicked. What if the viruses are out and about, loitering nearby the very nexus where those most likely to have them are most likely to gather? Damn, I thought. I should get myself tested. But the sim-card was calling my name. There’s isolation, and there’s isolation without connectivity. What would you do?

By the time I made it to Techexpert I was a mess. I collected the sim-card, gave scant consolation to my lab rat buddies who were about to close up for who-knows-how-long, peered through the reinforced glass shop front door at the stagnating traffic, inhaled a lungful of air-conditioned oxygen, and ran the gauntlet back to the car, wondering what was worse: the COVID-19 or the carbon monoxide clouding the atmosphere.

That was just over a week ago. I haven’t driven since.

Image Credit: James Littlewood