By Anastasia Pumphrey
The COVID-19 testing center experienced a delay on Monday morning due to a network issue with The Broad Institute that created a wait time of almost two hours.
Hill Alerts were sent out to the student body that morning explaining the delay, however some students waited in a long line to receive their COVID-19 test. Monday was the first active day of Stonehill’s new policy of testing twice per week with every residential student on campus.
According to Vice President and General Counsel Attorney Tom Flynn, a network error through Broad’s software company CareEvolve was the source of the delay.
“With all the schools in the area starting school again, the company misjudged and couldn’t handle the volume,” Flynn said.
He said that normally labels are printed in the testing center based on the person’s account and attached to the tubes used to collect the samples, but since there was a software error in pulling up each account, this process could not be accomplished correctly.
Jaymie Johnson, a sophomore, said that she was waiting in line for almost two hours.
“It was extremely frustrating and cold,” Johnson said. “I know that the testing center had little control over the situation, though, and I tried to focus on the small steps I was able to take forward.”
Johnson said that her appointment was originally at noon, but that she was able to wait in line for it to happen at almost two.
“Had this happened later in the semester, I would have been far more stressed about missing homework and study time,” Johnson said.
Other students were frustrated as well but tried to be as patient as they could. Senior Simone Payette said that she waited about an hour and 15 minutes.
“I listened to a podcast, so the wait wasn’t as bad, but it was pretty cold, and I was definitely not dressed to be outside for that long,” Payette said.
She said although it was stressful spending so much unexpected time waiting, she made it to her activities for the rest of the day.
Attorney Tom Flynn said that around 11:30 a.m. the testing center staff figured out a work-around to the issue by printing temporary labels with students’ names and student ID’s on them for the tubes.
“Broad recommended we shut down [testing], but we didn’t because of the work-around we found,” Flynn said.
Because of this temporary fix, the College was still able to administer 1,092 tests on Monday, and 1,467 on Tuesday. It was announced via email that the software issue was solved on Tuesday, but Flynn said that there was a lot of backlog from Monday. He said that to remedy this they had the staff come in early Tuesday morning to match each tube’s ID number with the correct student label once The Broad Institute was up and running again.
“It was a perfect storm,” Flynn said. “But I think it speaks to how we deal with things at Stonehill. Things go wrong, but we just roll with it and get through it like we did last semester.”
Flynn said that he was impressed with the students’ response to the delay, as he said no one complained to him and he did not see many students leaving the line. He said although he knew it was a frustrating thing for everyone, he was happy with the way they were able to fix the problem and is hopeful that the rest of the semester will go smoothly when it comes to testing.
Flynn also said that students should expect to wait no more than ten to 15 minutes to get their test, but the time of day matters most. His advice for students wishing to be tested in a timely manner was to pay attention to which times are the slowest, such as around dinnertime (five to six p.m.)
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