Posted at 6:00 a.m.
Simon Olivier Lorange
Traveling to the United States during the 2021-2022 season forced us to come to grips with a new reality: that of having to find a place to take a PCR test that could give us the result quickly enough to return to Canada without any problem.
The challenge was particularly great in short trips. In view of the February 20, 2022 match of the Canadian, in Long Island, it had been agreed, for various logistical reasons, that I would sleep only one night in New York. The room for maneuver was therefore slim. My colleague Jean-François Chaumont, from Montreal Journal, and I found a clinic, near our hotel in Queens, ready to receive us. But what a clinic…
From the outside, the only indication of a medical service was the mention “Urgent care”; moreover, the façade fitted in perfectly with that of its neighbours, a mattress store and a convenience store. Inside, imagine a copy center under renovation. At the counter, employees in cotton wool, visibly surprised to receive visitors on a Saturday at 5 p.m., hailed their boss, a man in a white coat who had arrived from the back room. The latter explained the procedure to us: we had to send him our personal information by text message and pay for the tests through a banking application that was unknown to us, otherwise in cash.
So we crossed the street to the nearest ATM before heading nervously back to the clinic, each with US$250 in our pockets — yes, rapid traveler tests cost a fortune. After the tests paid for, an employee shoved a swab deep into our noses and, after generously scraping what I suspect was my pancreas, told us we’d get the results back soon.
In the middle of the night, a PDF file was sent to me by the clinic’s Gmail address. This document, stamped with the logo of a New Jersey laboratory, confirmed a negative result, which I was able to present to customs the next day before entering the country without further questions.
Was I really negative? Was my sample even analyzed? We will never really know.
Alexander Pratt
It was January 2022. Quebec was engulfed in a tsunami of infections. The challenge: to avoid the virus, in order to be able to cover the Beijing Games. Easier said than done – especially when everyone else in the household is infected and contagious.
I isolated myself in a basement room for 12 days. Hit. Except that I was not at the end of my troubles. There were still a fortnight and three compulsory tests before departure. Colleagues from other media were withdrawing one after another. Felt like an aircraft carrier exposed in the game Battleship.
Fortunately, I won this round. But the virus took its revenge the week of the NHL Draft in Montreal…
Guillaume Lefrancois
PHOTO MIODRAG IGNJATOVIC, GETTY IMAGES
The interior of an anonymous Irish pub
The one involving my COVID-19 test to get home from Tampa in the summer of 2021 is pretty hard to beat. Otherwise, the Canadian’s “trip” to New York in December 2021, just before Christmas, will also remain in my more or less memorable memories. The Habs were scheduled to face the Islanders, Rangers and Devils from December 20-23. I leave the day before, Sunday 19. But we are then in the middle of the Omicron wave, cases are exploding everywhere, there are three in the CH locker room. It smells like cancellation…
So I land in La Guardia, direction UBS Arena for the duel between the Islanders and the Golden Knights in the afternoon. In the middle of the match, the news falls: the CH trip is canceled. All in all to change the date of the return ticket, which will finally be the next day. Lucky coincidence, the obligation to present a negative test for COVID-19 resumes on December 21, two days later, so that’s already less to manage. Except that Christmas is approaching, family dinner plans are still uncertain. So I go to my hotel in Manhattan, in a climate of fear of the virus, so as not to bring it home.
My night out in New York will be all about finding the biggest, least crowded restaurant possible, so I can sit in my own corner. So it ended in the back of a lengthwise Irish pub. I continued with a walk in the city, probably the most depressing of my life, wondering where this new wave was going to take us. Fortunately, life would quietly return to normal two months later…