From what I've heard, tons of college kids have been getting fake Covid test documents online. This is what happens when you require an 18-22 to present paper on semi short notice or get flunked out of yet still pay for a semester of school when a test takes as long as 15 days. Fake documents cost something like $20. I've known people who purchased fake vaccine documentation when they couldn't get a hold of their originals and didn't want to have to retake them but fake COVID tests is a new ball game.
Yeah COVID uncertainty and COVID absolutism has unleashed a torrent of grift, Sophie's Choices and rampant opportunism. The Chuds have been lashing out at all the unemployment fraud in WA state without acknowledging that maybe the Nigerians are targeting WA because their unemployment payouts are nearly double every other state? My favorite example of punishment/prevention mismatch was Italy, where breaking curfew was a misdemeanor but breaking curfew with a previous positive COVID test was MUTHERFUCKING INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER at which point you go "you know, I might have to buy bread and eggs at some point, probably better to not know for sure what this cough is." Back when I couldn't get COVID tested? We had COVID tests and a Quest account. They grab stuff out of the box a couple times a day and the kits for PCR are the same as for other stuff. So I coulda just had my wife run it. But Quest was charging $15k for that test and if my primary care provider hadn't authorized it, my insurance wouldn't pay a dime (and my PCP wasn't authorizing shit). And if it had come back positive we would have had to shut down the clinic, putting five people out of work, and forcing them to figure out how to get the same COVID test I couldn't get (or pay the same price, or maybe we pay the price?) while also dumping at least fifteen expectant mothers on the tender mercies of the very COVID ward profiled by Frontline a month later, that had previously put our name at the top of the list of "places to have a baby other than this hospital." Meanwhile I'm 100% sure I got COVID from my wife, who had it in Alaska, who caught it from our daughter, who had it at school along with half her class. One of our midwives had symptoms in early January. So we were pretty sure I was the end-point, not the start-point. But there was absolutely no physical way to verify that, and we were looking at an easy $75k in tests just to verify that yeah, nobody at the clinic is carrying anything at the moment. Who knows about last week, who knows about next week. "get tested" pretty much means "get fucked." That's something none of these high-minded eloi isolating with their PostMates has any real conception of. The perception and reality of the testing environment are not aligned, and their variance is as fickle as the weather.