Our Experience with the State of Hawaii’s Pre-Travel Testing Program
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A big focus of my initial Blog post was Hawaii’s new Pre-Travel Testing program. As I indicated, if you take a COVID-19 test within 72 hours of your departure to Maui, and you provide the State of Hawaii with proof of your negative test result, you are not subject to the mandatory 14-day quarantine upon arrival in the Hawaii. Again, the test MUST conducted by one of Hawaii’s “Trusted Travel and Testing Partners”.
Well, we are on our way to Maui right now (yep, in the air somewhere between LAX and Maui), and I’m here to provide you a summary of our experience with the new testing program. Admittedly, it is early in the program, so things may get better… Anyway, we had heard through various sources that some of the local Testing Partners in Southern California were having difficulties in getting test results returned within 72 hours. Therefore, just to cover our bases, we scheduled two sets of tests, with two different “partners”.
The first was CVS, where you can go to specific page on their website and schedule a voluntary test for traveling to Hawaii (https://www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/covid-19-testing/voluntary-testing). You have to pay for the test, and the price is $139 per test. It was easy to schedule the test on line, as long as you do it a couple of days in advance. Their scheduling site only shows three days: the current day, the next day, and the day after. Every time I looked at the site, there were no appointments available for the current day, only for the next day and the day after. They don’t have testing at every CVS, but the website shows you the closest locations in your zip code. The appointment process was super easy. We were flying Saturday morning at 8:20, so I made our appointments for 10:10 and 10:20 on Wednesday morning (the first appointment is 10:00, and they do 10-minute increments). The testing is done through the drive-through pharmacy window, and you don’t even leave your car. The person behind the window, verifies your appointment time and number, and your identity. They then explain the process to you, and ask if you have any questions. If not, they push the test kit out through the little teller drawer, and then they watche you self-administer the test. Once the sample is collected and stored appropriately, you drop it into the deposit slot, and you are done. The test is not the dreaded deep-nasal swab, but rather a shallow swab only an inch or so inside your nostrils (the test requires you do both). There is a little discomfort, and a little eye watering, but it is really not a big deal. We rolled up at 10:00, there was nobody in line, we did both our tests at the same time, and we were on the road home by 10:20. Super easy and efficient. Now for the bad news… As of when we jumped on the plane this morning, approximately 70 hours after we took the tests, no test results, no emails, no nothing from CVS. BOOO ON CVS!!! CVS SUCKS!!!
The second partner we went with was American Airlines. They have a mail-in testing program administered by LetsGetChecked (https://www.letsgetchecked.com/us/en/american-airlines/), where the lab is PrivaPath (one of Hawaii’s trusted labs). Setting this one up was also super easy. I ordered our two kits online ($129 each), and they showed up at home the next day via UPS NextDay. You then schedule a UPS pickup for the day you will be taking the test, and they provide a pre-addressed and prepaid UPS NextDay envelope in the test package. Once that is done, you have to go online and “activate” the test kit and fill out a basic health questionnaire. However, you can’t activate the kit until 72 hours before your departure time… which really isn’t explained anywhere on their website. No biggie. I went online when we got home from CVS, did the activation thing for my test, and at the end of the activation process I was asked if I wanted to schedule a video call to perform the test (the test has to be witnessed just like the one at CVS). I clicked “yes” and waited maybe 2 minutes for a test monitor to be available via video. Once we connected, the process was pretty much the same as I had followed at CVS earlier in the morning. Again a shallow nasal swab in both nostrils. The monitor watched me package up the sample for UPS and then we were done. After I did mine, Julie activated her test and did her video call, and we were both done with the second set of tests within 30 minutes, at basically 11:00 AM. Unfortunately, not knowing how long the process would take, I scheduled the UPS pick-up for between 1:00 and 5:00 PM that afternoon (Wednesday). Well, of course the UPS driver didn’t show up until 5:30 PM, which was a little unnerving, but at least we knew our samples were in the UPS system and trackable at that point. We were concerned with losing basically half a day with the samples sitting on our front porch, but at that point it was out of our hands. We just kept telling ourselves, “That’s why we did two sets of tests”. Well, I was at my desk at work the next morning, and I get a text at 8:15 AM from the lab advising me they received my sample and sample processing “normally takes 24 to 72 hours”. Well, the UPS NextDay certainly worked, and I knew the sample is now in the queue. Fast forward six hours, and at 1:20 PM THE SAME DAY, I get an email from the lab saying my test results are available! I click the link in the email and get the negative test result report! Holy crap! LESS THAN 20 HOURS AFTER UPS PICKED UP THE SAMPLES FROM OUR PORCH, WE HAVE TEST RESULTS!!! AMERICAN-LETSGETCHECKED-PRIVAPATH YOU ROCK!!!
Once again, CVS BOOO!!!
OK, disclaimer time, LOL. This was just our experience, so I’m not saying your experience with the system will be the same. It may be vastly different, and CVS may improve with time. My recommendation is you do your homework before you go. Make sure you go to the State of Hawaii website, fill out all the forms, get your test, submit the test to the website, fill out the online health form 24 hours before your departure, basically make sure all your “boxes are checked”. And, if you really, really want to have your test results back before you jump on the plane, consider doing two sets. Yeah sure, I’d preferred not to have to schedule and pay for a second set of tests, but for Julie and me the extra cost was small relative to the “personal value” of making this trip. We have lots of little projects scheduled for the next two weeks. Hmmm… maybe topics for future Blog posts???
Thanks for tuning in to post #2!
Stay safe, be well, and aloha until next time.
Randy
