Sick People Across the U.S. Say They Are Being Denied the Coronavirus Test

She is worried for her husband, who has lung cancer, and assumed, as other passengers had, that she would be tested as soon as she got to the base. So far that has not happened, though medical personnel have been taking their temperature twice a day.

Not knowing is making Ms. Moy nervous, as hundreds of people from the ship, mostly older guests, are in quarantine on the base now, and many of them may have been exposed to the virus. People are wearing masks, she said, but are still mingling in common areas, like the lobby where people get coffee and water. They take off their masks to drink and eat.

“I would like to know who among us is positive,” Ms. Moy said by telephone. “I don’t know. None of us know.”

Yet for those who do manage to get tested, the experience can be byzantine. Andy Carvin, 48, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, went to the Howard County General Hospital in Maryland last Thursday with a persistent fever and cough following a meeting with foreign journalists in February.

It started well. Health workers had cleared a path for him to walk to a back room. One doctor wore a large hooded mask and helmet and “looked like an Imperial Guard in ‘Star Wars.’”

They ran several tests, including of his blood. They swabbed his nose and throat about 10 hours later. But then it took a week to get the results back.

With no clear point of contact, Mr. Carvin made multiple calls — to the hospital, the state health department and two county health departments — to try to get the result. Three days later, he was told that one of the two swabs taken had never been sent to the state. At one point, he was given the wrong result. He called it “covid19purgatory.”

On Thursday, he finally got the good news: negative.

Reporting was contributed by Sabrina Tavernise from Washington; Sean Keenan from Atlanta; Patricia Mazzei from Miami; Wudan Yan from Seattle; Kate Taylor from Cambridge, Mass.; John Eligon and Thomas Fuller from San Francisco; Christopher Dixon from Charleston, S.C.; Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh; and Vanessa Swales and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York.