It's not really about how bad your symptoms get before you can get tested. It's about WHERE you are.

Coronavirus is a virus after all, just like the flu, there is no medication. You can only treat the symptoms, but not the virus itself (as opposed to a bacterial infection where you can attack the bacteria with antibiotics).

So with these undeniable facts it's fairly simple, if your symptoms are so mild that you can cure it out at home without special medical equipment like a ventilator, then you don't need testing. You just have to self isolate yourself for two weeks, get over it and afterwards you are fine and not contagious, so no way of further transmission and therefore no need to test.

If however you develop severe symptopms and need hospitalisation, then they have to test you so they know if they need to isolate you in hospital away from other patiens and protect staff or if you can get a bed amongst everyone else. That is really the only reason.

Your treatment in or outside hospital does not change at all whether you have breathing difficulties because of COVID-19 or any other influenza.

So that is it.

If you know you have the covid virus, then you know you have a disease that is far more dangerous than the standard flu, and so you need to take much more stringent measures to prevent others from being infected. You also need to have to health dept trace out all the people you may have infected already.

Don't know why this is downvoted. Doctors can't treat the virus but only the symptoms, even for the flu.

From a public health perspective, if you have any symptoms, be it covid-19 or flu, just isolate yourself for the health of others.

It's downvoted because it's dangerous and uninformed medical advice.

You can treat flu (influenza) with osetalmivir. People with mild symptoms can still be at risk, further testing is needed [1]

Please just phone your emergency line if you suspect you may have it.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610265

Would not the influenza vaccine be better than using osetalmivir?

These serve different purposes.

If you are already infected, a vaccine is not useful.

But regardless, there is no approved treatment for COVID.

Gilead's new antiviral looks promising, and the Chloroquine/Azithromycin combo looks promising, too, but the first isn't approved for any use yet, and the second is an uncertain off-label use, so in either case, you aren't going to get those treatments unless the alternative is likely death, if you can get them them at all.

I would guess their criteria for testing is people who could develop into a critical situation quickly because the tests are not 100 percent reliable and they are slow.

They were talking about having a televised only Olympics which might work if there were enough countries with athletes willing to fly to Japan.

Capacity of testing is a major issue, and as cases increase, turn around goes down. Tests have to be used where they will be useful and influence management.