If you develop fever, cough or other symptoms of COVID-19, please call your physician. Do not go to the ER unless you are very ill as most upper respiratory infections are not caused by SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for the COVID-19 disease). When the disease is widespread, the ER will be a great place to find it and we don’t want that.
While community testing is becoming more readily available, we generally recommend testing only in the setting of fever, cough, known or suspected exposure, or for healthcare providers. The testing situation is changing very rapidly. We have had many questions about whether we are testing in our office. We do have limited testing capacity.
The focus on drive-thru testing is that this is the most effective way to safely test large numbers of people while limiting the exposure of others to those being tested. Recent questions about the accuracy of various available tests have made this issue even more complex. The current rapid diagnostic test kits have variable sensitivity; those sent to reference labs are much more reliable.