Story by Taylor Heeden
Graphic by Claire Willmschen
Taylor Lucas was going about her day-to-day life as a doctoral student at East Carolina University’s Physical Therapy program. She was alerted through ECU’s contact tracing that she may have been exposed to COVID-19 in a class.
Lucas and some of her classmates went about trying to find a way to get tested for COVID-19 after learning of possible exposure.
“Around then, I didn’t really know how testing went in Greenville in general,” she said. “I never had to get tested through this whole pandemic.”
Lucas called ECU’s Campus Health facilities to ask about getting tested. What she did not know was how much she would be charged for her nasal swab.
“What I was told was it depends on your insurance, but if you don’t file insurance through what they take, then it was going to be a charge of $110,” she said.
As a college student, Lucas’s mind immediately went to the question of, “How can I afford that?”
“I don’t have a job, school is my job,” she said. “I’m not able to pay that, especially if it’s a negative test, and this is just for my safety so that I’m not infecting other people.”
Other UNC System schools, such as N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill, offer free COVID-19 testing for all of their students or offer resources where students can get tested for free elsewhere.
At ECU, however, they do not have free COVID-19 testing for all their students. ECU Media Relations said that while the university offers free testing to students who are living on campus, free testing isn’t offered to all students. ECU Media Relations also said the university hopes to offer free testing for students this spring.
Lucas ended up getting tested at an off-campus location for free, and then she waited for her test results to come in so she could return to the classroom. Lucas was told prior to getting tested she could get her tests from outside the ECU campus health facility, but she would have to upload her results to her health portal.
“I was under the impression that me going to those free drive-thru clinics, I could still use those tests because they’re valid tests given by a doctor,” she said. “But I guess that wasn’t 100 percent the case.”
Her test came back negative, and she uploaded her results to her health portal on a Friday. She waited for her confirmation so she could go to classes and take her midterm exams.
On Monday morning, Lucas still had not received a confirmation. She had to call campus health, once again, to see if they had gotten the results of her COVID tests.
“There were practicals and exams already rescheduled,” Lucas said. “I had to wait until my test came back negative, six days. I was just anxious about that and the risk of having to go past the end of the semester to wait to reschedule everything.”
Fortunately, Lucas was able to email her test results to the campus health facility faculty, who were then able to enter those results in manually.
Lucas said she hopes for the university to improve the testing system they have in place to be more accessible for all students, including having cheaper or free testing for every single student.
“We are required to have that confirmation to go back to class and quickly too,” Lucas said. “So if they have all of those standards set in place, then they should have a more accessible way to go get tested.”
