I got sent to a Seattle emergency room for COVID-19 symptoms and all I got was this “upper respiratory infection” diagnosis

Last night, I went to an emergency room in Seattle. My intent here is to summarize as clearly as I can what happened.

Allow me to preface this article by saying I’m sick as hell and never graduated college, so if I word anything bizarrely, incomprehensibly or inaccurate-to-medicine-ly, please chalk it up to my illness or my ignorance (and feel free to contact me with corrections).

After being trapped in a phone tree for quite some time (which told me to hang up if I hadn’t been out of the country recently), I was told by an urgent care nurse on the line to go to the ER for the symptoms I described (sick as hell, feverish, coughing, vomiting, chest pain with difficulty breathing, all abruptly worsening over the last week).

When I arrived, I was given a face mask, x-rayed, and later taken alone to a weird little room to get swabbed by a nurse wearing a mask that fully covered her face, attached to something that looked like a leafblower (a respirator, I suppose). I was sitting on something like an armchair that seemed like part of the room, and another patient was sitting on a folding chair.

The weird little room that I got swabbed in, from the perspective of sitting in some kind of medical-looking armchair. I only realized now that the three folding chairs probably aren’t normally in there.

The nurse who swabbed us had this kind of thing.

After that, they did some more typical hospital activities (took some of my blood and piss, had me wait in various other weird rooms) and eventually, a doctor came to speak to me. He told me I appeared to have a viral infection that “isn’t the flu” and then paused before quietly telling me I couldn’t be tested for COVID-19 unless my x-rays were abnormal— unless I already had pneumonia. He explained the unavailability of testing in a calm voice, in a tone that made me think he had been having to tell sick people about it for awhile. I got the impression that not being able to test me bothered him.

The staff members I spoke to told me that they have been doing 40 tests a day, that they “can’t test lots of people who probably have it,” that test availability will hopefully soon increase (“next week might be a little early, but we’re hoping in the next few weeks to be able to ramp testing up”), that hospitals are currently inundated with patients, and that they expect to diagnose many more “milder cases” when able to test more people.

I asked if there was anything else I could do. I said that I was more worried about potentially infecting other people with COVID-19 than about being sick myself, and wanted to keep that from happening. I was told that “we just have to take the usual precautions, and… hope things turn out okay.”

I got diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection, and discharged.

I don’t intend any of this article as a critique of the hospital, the doctors, or the nurses I was seen by. It was not a useless visit, since some of my symptoms were addressed, I do have an upper respiratory infection, and I was able to find out that I do not have pneumonia, which is great, but I and many others have been left uncertain as to whether we have COVID-19 and if so, whether there’s anything more we could do for others’ safety. Many of my friends cannot afford going to the ER even if their symptoms merit it. The ER itself at the hospital I went to seemed to be unequipped to handle the situation, for reasons beyond any of the doctors’ or nurses’ control — the medical staff I spoke to seemed troubled by being unable to test me, and were doing their best to provide the care they could.

I’m a chronically ill person with conditions that impact my immune system. I, and other disabled friends who are currently sick, are all unable to get tested for COVID-19 unless one of us develops pneumonia, I guess. I am worried by the lack of information and by how COVID-19 will continue to impact immunocompromised people. I am also afraid of spreading it to others — I am quarantining myself as much as possible, but live in an apartment building, and have to walk through the building to exit it (for example, to receive deliveries), and the doctor at the ER wasn’t able to give me advice other than washing my hands and hoping for the best.

While I am doing everything possible to limit contact with others, and don’t want to diminish the importance of hand washing and self-isolation, any attempt I could make at self-quarantining is barely better than a joke.

It was surreal and a bit frightening to be at the ER and taken into an isolation room to be swabbed by a nurse in a respirator and then to be told I appear to have a non-flu viral infection but can’t be tested for COVID-19, because almost no one can be. I wasn’t really expecting to be able to get tested, but hearing in person why I (and many, many people like me) couldn’t was fucked up. I keep thinking about the doctor who had to tell me why they couldn’t test me, and about the other patient in the isolation room with me.

The issue to me is not whether I do or don’t have COVID-19 — but that surely others in my same situation who went to the ER and heard the same thing have it, and either way, none of us know.