least three to seven days. what good does that do? no good. it has to be a rapid testing system and may mean if you do and again based. it s sensitive but you re right. if you have to wait more than 24 hours it is almost useless. you might be infected after that period. this means making those decisions if you re in a period right now where transmission is revving up maybe hold off why what s happening in washington, d.c. is different from california or oklahoma. seeing this surge in the northeast in a big wave and now down into georgia, mississippi,
data collection effort that d.c. has done since the pandemic began. next week 90,000 d.c. public school students will have to pick up rapid tests on monday or tuesday from their school, take that test on tuesday, report that test to a portal on tuesday before they can even walk in the school building on wednesday. this is 90,000 students, staff as well will have to do this. folks i talked to out here, whether or not they have kids, they re frustrated about this testing system. here is what they had to say. like everyone else, get a negative covid test. i want to get it before the new year s eve to have a good time with my family and friends since we can t go out and about. hopefully it will be a negative result. quite confusing. the opening hours are not clear. i came here yesterday and it was already closed so it s kind of should be more public or better announced i would say. reporter: now, when it comes to d.c. rapid tests, the city is actually handing out rapid tests to peo
down to ten, so we want to make sure that that is working as we would expect it to be. but that brings us back to lateral flow tests. for the system to work, there has to be enough of them to go around. labour says the government needs to get a grip and provide enough tests. catherine burns, bbc news. and cathjoins me now. a huge amount of pressure on the testing system at the moment? notjust an not just an issue notjust an issue with lateral flow test but also pcr test. at one stage this morning there were no pcr test to be sent out anywhere across the uk and have you wanted to book to go to a testing site you are not able to a testing site you are not able to do that in england or northern ireland. there were a few sites available in scotland that things were a little bit better in wales, but things change really quickly, so that was the case at 11 o clock today, now they are available again everywhere, and that is the same with lateral flow test. i try to order one around 9am, was t
tests when you knew this variant was on its way? exactly. mollie, he was given the most advanced testing system in the world. this was a novel virus. there were no tests when president trump inherited this. he got covid-19 in the united states coming over from china, there were no tests. he developed more tests and administered more tests than western europe combined by last fall for that is impressive. why didn t president biden keep it up? it s really important to go back and think about what last year was like before president the year before president biden was made a president. you look at what happened in this pandemic hits the world, the trump administration does a bunch of stuff that they should have done better, but on the big stuff they got everything right. namely developing these vaccines, overcoming the bureaucratic hurdles to get those vaccines, and by the time president biden is inaugurated,
they are mildly symptomatic or have no symptoms at all, that s really long, so if you can cut ten days to seven or ideally even five or fewer, i mean, maybe you could also have a testing system so that if you keep on doing daily tests until you test negative, maybe that s a way for us to go too. i also think right now we need to figure out a way to incentivize testing. right now we are disincentivizing testing because if somebody tests positive and now they re going to visit their relatives, they travel across the country, they test positive, that s really difficult for them. they re now stuck in another part of the country for ten days. they can t be at work. they maybe can t see their family. that s really a big problem. we need to figure out a way to make testing not only the right thing to do from the a public health standpoint, but also the we need to align the incentives so that people want to be tested. perhaps insurance companies can lower premiums for people who are testing