Deborah Gatewood​'s story is the same story I've been reading about here in New York since mid March. Literally 100's of stories exactly the same. That's the protocol, that's what they've all been doing!  That is what happens when you get it. They check for certain things and then they send you home.

They have to ration the testing. Testing doesn't help the patient. You keep posting these stories as if testing would help these patients you seem to be under the impression that it would help It doesn't really help the patient at all.

They don't test you unless you're going into the ICU,and the testing is not for the patient, it's to protect the providers.  They need to test you to know if they have to protect themselves from the patient or not, that tells them what ward/area to put you in, quarantined.

If you've got the symptoms, but your lungs are not shutting down, they prefer you go back home and sit it out and you don't show low level of oxygen the blood, they feel you're better off at home. In isolaton. Fever is good, means you're fighting it. 95% of people recover and nothing they can do for you while you go through it, no special meds.

Until you get to the stage of needing an ambulance and you have low blood oxygen, that's when you need a hospital and monitoring with oxygen and xrays to see where your lungs are at. And if it's so bad, that's when the ventilator comes. And guess what? The ventilator patients, most of them die, they do not survive. There's a lot of literature out there starting to shape up that they may do more harm than good. They don't understand this disease yet! And most people recover on their own.

Again, even in best case scenario, which we don't have, testing is for epidimiological purposes, not for treatment purposes. BECAUSE THERE ARE NO TREATMENTS YET.  NONE. ZERO.  It's horrible but reality. And ventilation is not working very well in the cases where people's lungs are shutting down. Again, many are thinking it's not saving many lives at all but causing some deaths. As an alternative to mostly unsuccessful ventilators, many big NY hospitals are now laying people face down on a special pillow to let more of the lungs open up while their immune system fights it. There's also signs that use of CPAP machine might be more help to self-healing  than serious intubation and ventilation. (Lot of people already use a CPAP at home every night for apnea.)

Testing is for epidemilogical purposes, to test and then trace the spread. It doesn't really help the individual patient at all cause there is no treatment that is working.

People that don't trust the providers in hospitals (and probably one shouldn't, it might be an opthamologist working on you, it's all hands on deck, every doctor and nurse, no matter what their specialty.) know to buy an oxygenator on Amazon now, and track your own oxygen level of your blood, and if it's falling a lot, get to a hospital for lung treatment, but don't get your hopes up that you've got great chances there. I know CNN anchor Chris Cuomo is doing that, he checks his own vitals every hour including his oxygen level in his blood. They sent him home too. Yeah he got a test. What good did it do? Not much except he could then tell the public what its like. He's had a high fever every day for 10 days I recall him saying.He has hallucinations when he sleeps and sweats like crazy, then gets chills. 

There's only one case where they are saying "get to a hospital" ASAP besides low blood oxygen. That's with the new cases of younger people who are having a stroke as a weird side effect of coronavirus infection. A stroke is something they can do something about if you get there in time.

The need for testing is the need to open up the economy. To know who has it and has to be quarantined. Testing n itself will not save anyone's life! There's no treatment for this disease

Not only all of that, but I've read several medical articles now where researchers are suspecting low oxygen level in the blood doesn't mean anything either. Because that used to be an indicator that the person might die soon. But they are getting readings in emergency room for people that should be near death, but they are chatting on their cell phones and able to move. THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS DISEASE YET, it's just that simple.  A positive test gets you as a patient: nothing much. Doesn't help. No treatment. Your body wins the fight or it doesn't. 

Finally, I have a friend who died from it early in the epidemic, age 69. He had money and on Medicare. A history of asthma, but not severe. He died in the hospital on a ventilator. A lot of us are suspecting that if he hadn't been put on that ventilator, and had just been treated at home or hospital with oxygen, he might still be with us. He went to a hospital in the suburbs. He should have gone to a shit public hospital in Queens, that's were they were seeing that intubation and ventilator was counterproductive with people like him, that's where they had the experience and were learning what worked and what didn't.

And yes, of course, if you already are a  chronically ill diabetic or like on dialysis, you belong in the hospital if you get an infection. Any infection. That's a different thing. Testing for coronavirus still wouldn't help you! They would just do whatever they could to keep you alive, with a high chance of failure.

Whypipple with National Health Service to serve them, where the protocol or "guidance" is to sit and wait out the illness at home: