One recent week, a New Yorker got a free COVID-19 test in a jiffy, with results the next day, while a Coloradan had to pay $50 for a test two cities from her hometown after a frantic search. A Montanan drove an hour each way to get a test, wondering if, this time, it would again take five days to get results.

While COVID testing is much easier to come by than it was early in the pandemic, the ability to get a test — and timely results — can vary widely nationwide. A fragmented testing system, complicated logistics, technician burnout and squirrelly spikes in demand are contributing to this bumpy ride.

“We’re still where we were 18 months ago,” said Rebecca Stanfel, the Montana woman who had to wait five days for test results in Helena last month after being exposed to someone with the virus.

Unpredictable waits can be a problem for those trying to plan travel, return to school from a quarantine — or even get lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatment within the optimal window if they do have COVID.

Public health labs are no longer hamstrung by supply bottlenecks on individual test components such as swabs or reagents, said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. But they are still bearing a large testing load, which she had expected to shift more to commercial or hospital-based labs by now.

Testing labs of all stripes are also facing worker shortages just like restaurants, said Mara Aspinall, co-founder of Arizona State University’s biomedical diagnostics program, who also writes a weekly newsletter monitoring national testing capacity and serves on the board of a rapid-testing company.

“The staffing shortage is very, very real and holding people back from increasing capacity,” she said.

Even in a place such as Longmont, Colo., near many laboratories and hospitals, PCR samples from the local mass-testing site get shipped by air daily to a lab in North Carolina.

A mass-testing operation recently moved back to its original location at the county fairgrounds after a summer stint in a small church parking lot. Demand for PCR tests in the county quadrupled from 600 weekly tests in July to 2,500 a week in September. Chris Campbell, emergency manager for Boulder County Public Health.

Campbell said it sometimes took residents four or five days to get their PCR results, though that’s dropped to two as the contractor they work with has built its laboratory capacity back up.

“It’s pretty inexcusable to have a turnaround time that long. It really does impact our ability to really stop transmission,” Campbell said. “And also, it has an economic impact to businesses, to schools, to early childhood facilities.”