Need a COVID test now? Here’s a way to find last second appointments around Kansas City
The need for COVID-19 tests in Kansas City is high. At-home tests are hard to find and appointments are booked for days. One Kansas City area man created a tool that can help you find a COVID-19 test appointment as soon as you need one.
Peter Carnesciali is the creator of KC Vaccine Watch, a Twitter bot that updates every 10 minutes with open appointments for COVID-19 tests. It first started as a bot for finding COVID-19 vaccines, but as those became easily available and tests became hard to find, he changed the bot to find testing appointments.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Carnesciali wrote a code to have a bot that requests CVS’s appointment system every 10 minutes. Each time, it looks at all the locations around Kansas City and determines if there’s a new opening that wasn’t there previously.
If the bot finds something new, it’ll send out a tweet with the location, the day of the appointment and the ZIP code where the CVS is, with a link for you to sign up. The automated tweet also tells you if it’s a rapid antigen test or a PCR test.
As of Jan. 12, the bot only tracks the current and following day. Carnesciali designed the bot like this to show test slots that are available as soon as possible after people told him they are looking for tests right away, not next week.
WHAT DOES IT TRACK?
It only tracks single appointments that people canceled at CVS locations. Adding other test sites to the system would be really complicated to do, Carnesciali said, and other pharmacy websites have more restrictions that make this information harder to access and pull.
HOW CAN I FIND A COVID-19 TEST USING THE KC VACCINE WATCH BOT?
You have to look at @kcvaccinewatch’s account on Twitter. You do not need your own Twitter account to look at the page, but if you have one, you could follow @kcvaccinewatch and set up notifications so you know when new appointments open up.
Carnesciali said that the test slots are usually booked quickly after the bot tweets about them, sometimes within just a few minutes.
“My goal is to be able to help people who need help finding a COVID test,” he said.”If this can help people not have to wait several days, and it helps them get one sooner than that, then I’m happy to help.”
Here are other sites around Kansas City offering COVID-19 tests, and how you can request one from the state of Missouri.
The timing of when you take your test and which kind of test you take matters. If you need a refresher on which kind of test is best to take when, we’ve got you covered.
Do you have other questions about this latest wave of COVID-19 in Kansas City? Ask us at kcq@kcstar.com or with the form below.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.