Coronavirus testing guidelines, delays leave many ill Idahoans frustrated
Editor’s note: Two of the subjects in this story agreed to talk to the Idaho Statesman but did not want their last names used for publication.
Jamie started to feel sick after her husband came back from a trip to Wyoming in early March. Her husband started feeling a little off, too, and then he developed a fever. Then one of her three children got sick.
Jamie, a 44-year-old Boise resident, had a fever and body aches, signs of the flu or even a cold. But this fever felt different, she said. The body aches felt different. She said it felt like her head was going to explode. Her husband was tested for strep throat and the flu, and both came back negative.
“I just had this gut feeling it was the virus,” she told the Idaho Statesman.
It was. But it took her more than two weeks to find out, and by that time, her whole family was sick.
Jamie’s story, of struggling to get tested for the coronavirus and then waiting for results, is one that several Idahoans can relate to. People from across the state experienced delays in receiving the outcome of their COVID-19 testing or were not able to get tested at all, especially in the early weeks of the outbreak, leaving many in the dark and wondering whether it was safe to even leave the house.
After feeling symptoms for a few days, Jamie decided she should get tested. She is asthmatic, making her more concerned since people with underlying conditions are at greater risk if they are infected. She drove to St. Luke’s Meridian on March 18, where she waited in line for about an hour and 40 minutes, she said.
Jamie told the nurse about her asthma, and that she was experiencing a fever and body aches. The nurse asked if she needed to go to the emergency room, and Jamie said no.
Jamie was deferred, turned away from being tested. She said she learned later that the only people being tested that day were those with respiratory issues who needed to go to the ER.
“When I was sent away, I was frustrated,” she said. She wondered why patients weren’t being told explicitly what symptoms would merit being tested.
Jamie drove home, where her symptoms worsened. She self-medicated by using more of her asthma medication. Her two other children started developing symptoms.
Two days later, on March 20, she received a call from her doctor asking whether she was tested. After she told him no, the doctor told her to go back to try again, as she was told the criteria had changed.
This time, she was tested. And then she waited. Her doctor called her 12 days later, at 10 p.m., to tell her she tested positive for the virus. She was also told to assume that everyone in her home had it.
Jamie remains surprised that she was turned away the first time despite her symptoms, preexisting condition and her husband’s recent travels.
“I just wish we had learned about it faster, because then we would’ve quarantined better,” she said.
Coronavirus testing obstacles in Idaho
Idaho uses priority guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in determining which samples will be tested at the Idaho State Laboratory and which will be sent to private labs out of state.
The CDC has three priorities for COVID-19 testing. First priority testing is reserved for hospitalized patients and health care workers who are showing symptoms. Those classified in the second priority are people who fit into at least one of the following categories: first responders; people showing symptoms in a long-term care facility; people over the age of 65; those who are high-risk because of an underlying medical condition; people with a “severe” upper respiratory illness with no known cause; and staff or inmates in a correctional facility.
Everyone else looking to get tested would fall into the third category.
Those in the first and second priorities have their samples tested at the state lab, which can get test results back within a day or two. However, tests for those in the third category go to the private labs, which can cause significant delays because of a backup at those labs.
Private labs handling Idaho tests have come and gone. ARUP Labs, based in Salt Lake City, announced in mid-March it would be accepting COVID-19 test samples. Four days later, it could no longer accept test samples.
Some of the first companies to accept samples from Idaho were LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics, with each company introducing coronavirus tests in early March. Since then, both companies have been increasing their testing capacities, but acknowledged in press releases that the demand has been difficult to keep up with.
The labs for both companies are spread across the country, with none in Idaho. And even as testing is becoming more widespread, many samples still have to be sent out of state for analysis.
Anita Kissee, public relations manager for St. Luke’s Health System, said in early April that the hospital sent most COVID-19 tests to a lab at the University of Washington, where the turnaround time was three to four days. Inpatient samples would go to the state lab, which is in alignment with CDC protocols.
More recently, St. Luke’s announced that all tests taken by the hospital chain would be examined in-house in order to cut down on wait times. In a news release Monday, St. Luke’s indicated that it stopped sending coronavirus tests to large commercial laboratories that “took more than eight days to return results.” In fact, the hospital now can get results on tests in a matter of hours, Kissee said.
Rural Idahoans face steeper challenges
Samantha, a resident of Mountain Home, started feeling sick a week after a work trip took her through Seattle in early March.
She soon developed a sore throat and stuffed-up sinuses, before she found it was harder to take deep breaths. One morning, her husband pointed out that the lymph nodes in her neck were swollen. Samantha drove to an urgent care clinic in Boise on March 4. (She said she drives to Boise for almost all of her health care needs.)
An urgent care doctor thought it was an upper respiratory infection, which Samantha found strange. She’s had those infections in the past, she said, but they were never this bad. She asked if it was possible that she contracted the coronavirus while traveling through Seattle.
“It was frustrating. They assured me I didn’t have COVID,” Samantha said.
The doctor prescribed steroids to open up her throat, she said, but two days later she was in the emergency room after a negative reaction.
Samantha, who like Jamie has asthma, sat at home with a fever and continued to have difficulty breathing. When she heard that drive-up testing was being made available in Ada County, she made the drive to Boise.
A nurse took a swab of Samantha’s throat and told her she would have the results back in five to seven days. On the seventh day of waiting, Samantha called her doctor, who told her the results would take longer to get. Samantha said she received her results 11 days after she was tested.
Though her test came back negative, Samantha remains skeptical. Included in her test results was a message saying the coronavirus test “is not perfect,” and if she continues to have coronavirus symptoms, she should isolate.
“I wasn’t isolating like I should have been, after being told I couldn’t have it,” she said. “Hopefully I didn’t share anything.”
Samantha said she’s improving and her sense of smell is starting to come back. She said health care professionals were doing the best they could based on the information they were given. She also said government leaders should have taken the threat of coronavirus seriously.
“I wish we would’ve been more proactive rather than reactive,” she said.
Couldn’t get tested, probably had the virus
To the north, Lindsay Wagenmann faced issues with getting tested in rural Idaho County, an area with only three reported cases of the coronavirus as of Monday.
Wagenmann, a 34-year-old Grangeville resident, started feeling ill on a Sunday. By Tuesday, it seemed like the flu, she said, but by Wednesday she had a high fever and difficulty breathing. No prior sickness compared to this one, she said.
“It’s like someone was sitting on my chest,” Wagenmann said.
An ER doctor tested her for strep throat and influenza, and both came back negative. The doctor told her he “was sure it was COVID,” she said. However, Wagenmann said she was not allowed to be tested for the coronavirus because she was not a health care worker or older than 65.
Already immunocompromised because of a bout with West Nile virus in years past, Wagenmann was sent home untested, where her breathing trouble got worse. Other nearby hospitals in Lewiston wouldn’t test her either, she said.
Wagenmann’s sister — a nurse in Pullman, Washington — said she could get tested if she made the drive, but Wagenmann wasn’t feeling well enough to travel. After nearly a week, she said, her fever broke and she began to improve, but her senses of taste and smell took longer to come back.
Now that she’s recovered from her symptoms, she still wonders about the virus. “At this point I don’t even know if I would test positive,” Wagenmann said.
Wagenmann said the restrictions on testing were frustrating, to say the least..
“We know there are a lot of tests here, but part of me thinks they don’t want the numbers here,” Wagenmann said.
Going forward
Testing is becoming more and more available now, but the effects of limited testing early on still linger.
All five in her household have recovered, Jamie said, but it took her longer. And she still wonders whether her family did enough to quarantine and prevent spreading the virus.
Leading up to her diagnosis, Jamie said she stayed in contact with her sister in Seattle and a friend in Prague, Czech Republic. Both warned her that sooner or later the virus would spread everywhere. She believes Idaho had a response that was too relaxed.
“I think that everybody was doing the best they could, but it was scary how we did not learn from other countries going through this how to manage this,” Jamie said.
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 12:50 PM.
