Further Speculations on the COVIDtests.gov Issues

[ermingarden]

(A follow-up to this post.)

I'm sure someone else has already said this elsewhere (and I may be wrong), but I've been thinking, and it seems to me that all of the issues may stem from the fact that ordering tests is being done through USPS – i.e., they're using the USPS address database.

USPS doesn't know or care how many people live in my apartment building – all that matters to the Postal Service is the street address. It delivers all the mail to "123 Streetname St." and the mailroom staff are the ones who sort it by unit number. So from the perspective of the Postal Service, a large apartment building with an internal mailroom and a single-family house are identical. (If you live in an apartment building with separate mailboxes accessible from the street rather than an internal mailroom, USPS does distinguish between unit numbers, so you might be okay.)

If you have a PO box in an actual post office, USPS is taking the mail all the way to your box, so at least some people with PO boxes have been able to get tests just fine. However, if you have a box in, e.g., a UPS store, it's just like an apartment building with an internal mailroom – USPS doesn't care about anything beyond the street address, so the street address is what's in the database, not unit or box numbers.

If this is right, then if the person who actually puts the mail in your mailbox is a Postal Service employee, you may be fine; if there's an intermediary between you and USPS, there's a problem.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like it'll be a quick fix. If this is the source, it's not a website glitch – the data just isn't there. And as far as I know, we don't have a comprehensive database of addresses that's more detailed than the Postal Service's.

Comments

[independence1776]

Oh dear. That covers rather a large percentage of the population.

[ermingarden]

Yeah, I don't know what the numbers would be, but if this is really the problem...that's probably what, a third of the population affected? A quarter? Even if it's only a tenth of the population, that's still over 30 million people.

[ermingarden]

Considering sathari's comment (below), I was (thankfully!) overestimating the percentage of the population affected.

[chestnut_pod]

*tears hair our*

[ermingarden]

[sathari]

This is fascinating to me, because I've always lived in apartments/condominiums as an adult, and we've always had separate actual-USPS boxes that the actual letter carriers carriers put our mail into. (Not in college; that had the mailroom staff doing the sorting, as you describe.) So... this is... interesting.

[ermingarden]

Thanks! I don't know what percentage of apartment buildings are each type, but that suggests that the percentage of people affected may be much smaller than I thought it might be – good!

[zdenka]

On the other hand, my apartment building has separate USPS boxes and this doesn't seem to help . . .

[ermingarden]

Uh-oh.

[atamascolily]

To me, the real issue isn't the apartment building thing/postal service database, so much as the 4-test limit, which makes it an issue. If there wasn't externally imposed scarcity, none of this would matter; people would be able to request what they need in the amount they needed it when they needed it. I'm not sure where the number four came from, or why four tests would be anywhere near adequate or sufficient under the circumstances, especially for a single-use product. It's like the checks that the government sent out at the beginning of the pandemic--a good first step, but not enough in and of itself to address the problem.

But the US government has not made the manufacture of Covds tests or protective gear a priority, and this decision has caused a cascading chain of problems as a result.

[ermingarden]

That's fair! For me, the two issues are frustrating in different ways: The four-test limit is a policy decision, while the USPS problem is just sloppiness.

[ysilme]

That makes a lot of sense. For me, only knowing completely different systems (Germany and France, but both are alike) this also sounds rather strange and prone to failure in so many regards... I've been known to bitch about issues around our systems if problems arose, but now I'm just grateful about it! I just hope the issues with yours regarding the tests are fixable in a useful manner for you all!