Patients face difficulties to schedule Covid test in São Paulo

With the holiday season, the flu and the increase in the number of Covid cases, the demand for the test to identify the disease caused by Sars-Cov-2 has grown. Amid this high demand, patients find it difficult to schedule a time to do it in pharmacies in São Paulo.

Between last Wednesday (29) and this Monday (3), the leaf consulted the online agenda of 40 drugstores belonging to large pharmacy chains in the five regions of the city of São Paulo. Only three of them were available to perform the test on the same day.

Before, to take the test, it was enough to schedule for the same day. Now, it is common to have to wait at least two days and, in some cases, even five.

Attendants reported that they observed an increase in the number of people with flu symptoms seeking Covid tests, in addition to those who went to the establishments to find out whether or not they have the disease before attending meetings with family and friends to celebrate the final parties of year. Another reason is the need for a report with a negative result in order to travel.

Report from leaf showed that positive tests rose again during the holiday season, according to the monitoring of Abrafarma (an association that brings together large pharmaceutical chains). The total number of positives jumped from 524 on December 1st, when 10,000 tests were taken, to 5,334 on December 29, when there were 31,332 tests — equivalent to 5% and 17% of the total, respectively. The survey covers 3,000 pharmacies in the country.

The writer Fábio Saraiva visited two pharmacies on the coast of São Paulo and seven in the capital so that he could find a test for Covid. After everyone completed the vaccination cycle, he and his friends decided to come back with the football they had stopped at the beginning of the pandemic. One of them, however, discovered days later that he was infected with the coronavirus, which meant that the writer had to seek a test.

Saraiva received the news at Christmas, Saturday (25), when he was in Itanhaém, on the south coast of São Paulo, with his family. He began his pilgrimage there in search of a test that could attest to whether or not he was infected.

The two pharmacies he visited could only perform the test on Monday, two days later. The attendant at one of them even checked the schedule of another unit in the municipality itself and in the cities of Mongaguá, Praia Grande and Peruíbe, but none of them was available to serve him.

Back in São Paulo, he heard from most of them that he could only be seen in two days. In one, the pharmacy had run so many tests that some of the material had run out.

The next day, Sunday (26), on his ninth attempt, he found a unit that had immediate availability, with no need for an appointment. There he managed to do the antigen test for Covid and for influenza.

“We are in a pandemic. Maybe in one of the countries that tested the least proportionally. And then you start to realize that if you want to test yourself, where? How? When? You can’t,” says Saraiva.

Drug stores offer rapid antigen tests, which check whether a person is infected with the virus at the time of testing. In addition to these, serology tests are available to indicate whether the patient is or has been infected.

Antigen tests are offered in “swab” and “oral” modes. In the first case, the sample is collected using a cotton swab introduced through the nostrils. In the second, it is removed from the throat region through the mouth. Results come out in about 15 minutes. Tests that detect influenza type A and B are also offered.

The capital of São Paulo has seen an increase in hospitalizations for Srg (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in recent weeks. According to data from the Covid Panel of the Municipal Health Department, the number of hospitalizations for flu reached 24.5% of the total of those caused by flu-like symptoms in the public health system for the last epidemiological week (from December 19th to 25th).

Of 363 cases of srag, 149 are caused by influenza. In the previous week (December 12th to 18th), there were 243 cases of influenza, about 22.5% of the total of 973 admissions. In the same period, admissions for Covid had a 15% drop compared to the previous week (December 12th to 18th).

A few days later, however, the number of admissions began to rise. On December 28, the state registered 581 new hospitalizations, reaching the mark of 1,015 patients in ICU beds. The threshold of one thousand admissions, however, had already been surpassed on Christmas Eve, on December 24th.

The weekly moving average had almost doubled in December in São Paulo: it jumped from 283 in the first week of the month to 465 on December 28, according to data from Infotracker, a project by USP (University of São Paulo) and Unifesp (University São Paulo) that monitors the pandemic.

Physician André Ricardo Ribas Freitas, professor of epidemiology at the São Leopoldo Mandic School of Medicine, observed an increase in the number of patients with flu-like symptoms after the holiday season.

The professor believes that the difficulty in finding places to carry out the test is due to the growth of cases resulting from the omicron variant, added to the influenza virus and the holiday season, which create the right scenario for the spread of the virus.

Freitas stresses that in case of flu-like symptoms the procedures remain the same: isolate yourself until you have the result of a test identifying the disease. In the case of flu, the professor recommends an isolation of about seven days to reduce the circulation of the virus.

“Isolation will slow the spread a little and reduce the risk of overloading the hospital system. Although influenza leads to fewer hospitalizations, patients with chronic illnesses, the elderly, pregnant women and young children are at risk for a worsening that is not despicable,” says Freitas.