“I started to feel symptomatic five days after traveling.”

“It’s different than the bronchitis

that I’ve gotten before.”

“Everything had kind of settled in my lungs.

And I was just coughing a ton.”

“I had a headache and felt feverish.”

“It felt like I had a bowling ball on my chest.

Nobody’s willing to see me, and nobody has the test kit

and even C.D.C. is refusing to test me.”

“I traced back, you know, my wife,

she works at Amazon. They had a confirmed case.”

“Four different planes

in four different airports.

So I don’t know who sat next to me

or who I was in contact with.”

“It’s one person coming in from China,

and we have it under control.

It’s going to be just fine.”

“We’re going down, not up.

We’re going very substantially down. Not up.”

“Anybody that needs a test, gets a test.

They’re there.

They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”

“We have a president saying anyone who

wants tests can get a test.

And I’m thinking, That is so not true.”

“It was just interesting, because there

was this kind of gray area for a while of people who

felt like they were really sick

and should have been tested just as,

even as a rule out.

And the state of Washington

just did not have the capacity to do that,

because the government had not supported us

at that point essentially.”

“I got through to public health

after about an hour, and they told me

that I did not meet the criteria for being tested.”

“They said, ‘There’s no way to get tested.

We don’t have tests right now.

There’s nothing set up in Delaware.’”

“I looked at the C.D.C. website and it said, call your doctor

if you have the symptoms.

So I called the doctor’s office

and they told me to go to an urgent care facility.

I called an urgent care facility

and they said that there’s nothing that they can do.

And they don’t have the tests.

And they told me to go to the E.R.

And I called a hospital, and they told me

that they don’t have the test either.”

“I just felt like I was getting the run-around.

It was clearly obvious that they just

are under capacity, and they’re not able to test.”

“I eventually just gave up because, at that point,

the testing criteria was so strict. It was,

you travel to China or have you been in contact with someone

known diagnosed Covid.

And I didn’t meet any of that.”

“As a nurse in an E.R.,

it’s pretty vital if I have an infectious disease

that I know what it is because I could be spreading it

to people who are really vulnerable.”

“I actually work in a building that’s a fairly public place.

There’s people of every generation coming in there.

There’s a private school there.

There’s a senior center.”

“Southwest Florida is full of elders.

There is a lot of snowbirds coming here.

They’re all in their 70s and 80s.

I cannot get myself, like I cannot convince

my conscience to leave the house just thinking about

that, Hey you went grocery shopping

and now like five people died.

So I just self quarantined myself

and basically started working from home.”

“We stocked up on food items as much as possible.

I bought a 25 pound bag of rice.

We bought beans.

We got ready basically just

to hunker down for those two weeks.

At this point, I’m telling people like make —

if you have a decision to make,

think about survival and make the decision

based on survival for yourself,

your family and your community.”

“We knew this was coming.

The federal government is just completely bungling this,

and our lives are at stake.

I feel like they’re just leaving us here

to die in Seattle.”

“The most overwhelming feeling was

you are on your own.”

“I’m just really concerned for those

that this is going to affect the hardest.

And I think we pretty much failed at early testing,

early containment.

We had more time than other governments.”