CHICAGO — Tricia Poreda recently walked inside a COVID-19 testing center on the city’s Northwest Side and was immediately appalled by the facility’s lack of basic health and safety protocols.
Employees collecting specimens weren’t changing gloves or washing hands in between patients, she recalled. The site didn’t seem to be enforcing social distancing and the employees performing tests weren’t wearing proper personal protection equipment.
“I would say if you didn’t have (COVID) when you walked in, there’s a good chance you had it when you walked out, with those kinds of practices,” said Poreda, an ICU nurse, who left that center and found another location to get tested for the virus. “Some of those places are superspreader sites on their own.”
With COVID-19 testing in high demand in the Chicago area, medical experts and government officials are warning consumers to be extremely wary of substandard or fraudulent “pop-up” testing centers. Some of them have been found operating in sketchy settings while others have reportedly given patients fake results — or failed to return any results at all.
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