The next morning, March 6, my wife and I decided to keep our two children home from school for the day, as we would receive the results some time on Saturday, and it wasn't worth putting anyone else at risk. Yet the weekend passed without resolution. The president, during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Thursday, had said, "Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That's what the bottom line is. ... And the tests are all perfect." I was about to learn just how imperfect they were.
When I didn't hear from the state health department, I started making my own calls, trying to reach anyone who might have my results. An epidemiologist in the state health department told me to call the county health department or the ER. The ER directed me back to the state and county health departments. The county health department wasn't sure who would get the results.
Late Sunday, March 8, I heard from an outbreak investigator at the county health department. She had discovered that only one of my two specimens had been sent in for testing, despite a two-specimen protocol; the other was still sitting in an ER refrigerator. She told me she'd arrange for my second specimen to be sent to the state lab first thing Monday, though the lab probably wouldn't expedite it, which meant my results would take until at least Tuesday or Wednesday. The 48-hour clock had been reset to zero.
Meanwhile, beyond the confines of my house, the situation around the country began to spiral downward: stock markets swooning; event cancellations; people freaking out over Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, testing positive. Other countries, such as South Korea, had settled into a rhythm, capable of testing thousands of people per day. Here in the U.S.? More stories of people getting turned away from getting tested.
The waiting continued. My kids-a 13-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy-stayed home from school, stressed out not knowing when I'd receive my test results. I'd been very open with them about what was going on, but the thing that upset them the most was no one giving me a straight answer about my COVID-19 test. How could this be happening, they would ask.
At one point, I checked with the ER for an update, and a nurse told me my coronavirus test had come out negative the previous Thursday. This didn't make much sense to me, so I conferred again with the county health department investigator, who concluded the nurse was mistakenly referring to tests for other coronavirus types I took during my hospital visit rather than COVID-19 specifically.
In other words, if I hadn't sensed something was wrong with the diagnosis, I would've taken the nurse's declaration as a negative result and strolled out of my house, despite the fact the most important test results hadn't actually been completed. Who knows how many people I might have accidentally exposed if I turned out to have COVID-19?
I stayed at home, and the additional 48 hours came and went. On Wednesday night, the same night the president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, I published a Twitter thread about my #covid19purgatory, which went viral, accumulating more than 11,000 retweets and 24,000 likes. While my thread didn't speed up getting the results-I would have to wait until midday Thursday, one full week after getting tested-it certainly got the hospital's attention, with multiple senior administrators reaching out to apologize and discuss the many things that had gone wrong.
I told the administrators I was less concerned about my own health-my symptoms were relatively mild-than I was about how my experience could be a troubling sign of things to come. No doubt the number of COVID-19 cases wouldexplode, I reasoned, with each potential case representing a person not knowing whether he or she was sick.
In a best-case scenario, each person would have a single point of contact to track his or her results, whether it were via a website, text message, or even a toll-free number. In a best-case scenario, they'd have the COVID-19 equivalent of a FedEx tracking number that would estimate how long it would be until they received the results, the location of their specimens and their status. In a best-case scenario, potential COVID-19 patients could plan accordingly, for themselves, their families, their places of employment, their schools and anyone else who could be affected by a positive test result.
In a best-case scenario.
To date, this best-case scenario doesn't exist at scale. For the vast majority of potential COVID-19 patients in the U.S., there is no one point of contact, no tracking number, no monitoring system to help them make better-informed decisions. There is no government website, or one created by Google, despite President Donald Trump's insistence that one is in development. Instead, we have a free-for-all in which anyone worried about themselves, their families and their communities must contend with an opaque, confused system that is not prepared to keep them informed.
After seven days, I got my results. When I first took the test, the cases in the U.S. were estimated at 300. By the time I got my results back that number had more than tripled. And it has tripled again as of Sunday. My COVID-19 test came back negative. So that's one person they can check off the list. Now, what about everyone else?
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