Opinion | One Week, Three E.R. Visits to Learn if I Had the Coronavirus

The operator at the state coronavirus hotline gave me another wrong number. Finally, I called 311, the city information line. After one more erroneous connection, I reached a call center for the city Health Department, where someone told me she had no idea where my swab was or what my quarantine instructions should be — only Mount Sinai Hospital could answer that. She, too, said the city was only testing people who had been to an outbreak country or in contact with someone known to have the virus.

In the meantime, two more seriously ill people were diagnosed with Covid-19 in New York City — neither had any foreign travel or known contact with a diagnosed coronavirus patient. Local person-to-person transmission had already begun.

At that point, I called my primary doctor. He said he had just gotten off a call with the C.D.C. “We’re all going to get it,” he said. “At a certain point, they’re just going to stop testing and assume people with symptoms have it.” Meanwhile, he thought that testing should be happening broadly, in every doctor’s office — but of course there were nowhere near enough tests for that. He advised me to stay home except for grocery and pharmacy runs, and wear a mask.

Just because I wanted to see this through, I made one more call to Mount Sinai and asked where my coronavirus swab was. “It wasn’t sent,” said the same physician’s assistant I had talked with before. “Actually, I really don’t know,” she said.

On Friday morning, my 4-year-old daughter, as well as my son, had a fever. Following medical advice, I had sent her to school throughout the week and potentially exposed other children. I was furious. I should not have had to make that decision on my own, without clear medical directives. But the emergency room doctors giving me instructions were trained to save individual lives, not strategize to head off a pandemic.

When I called the press offices of Mount Sinai Hospital and the governor’s office on Friday to request clarifications for this article, officials at the hospital offered me a Covid-19 test that evening.

On Sunday night I found out it was negative.

Robin Shulman is a freelance journalist. Her book, “Eat the City,” is a history of foods produced in New York City. She is now working on a book about refugees.

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