COVID-19 test negative for Free Press staffer

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2020 (1631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The evening my column about my 18-day wait for a COVID-19 test result appeared on the Winnipeg Free Press website, I received an email from Dr. Paul Sawchuk at Access Transcona. In it, he provided his cellphone number and asked that I call him at my earliest convenience.

“I was reading your article and I was thinking ‘that’s an insane amount of time to wait for results,’” he said Thursday morning. “And then I recognized your name.”

Sawchuk, a co-site medical lead at the Regent Avenue clinic, said he has been extremely busy calling hundreds of people with their test results since the coronavirus outbreak began in the province earlier this month. But he remembered calling me a couple of times and always getting a busy signal.

After repeating back to me the number he was calling, I recognized it as one that belonged to a former landline, long since cancelled but I assume still registered with Health Canada.

He suspects my current cellphone number, the one I left with the health-care workers at the test site, might have been incorrectly recorded.

Anyway, to my relief, my test results, and my daughter’s, are negative.

leesa.dahl@freepress.mb.ca