COVID triage machine 3000

—> You answered: YES, the patient has symptoms, but does not have any known exposure. Next question:

Are the symptoms acute or chronic?

  • “Acute” = any new potential COVID symptoms (see notes below) in the past 14 days, even if some of them have been around for longer.

  • “Chronic” = prolonged, steady symptoms of > 2 weeks duration without any significant changes during this time.

Notes:

Acute vs Chronic: the purpose is to determine if COVID workup is needed. Chronic symptoms past 2 weeks duration without any changes or recent fever are either not COVID or are past the contagiousness period of COVID. But if some of the symptoms are new or there was a significant change in symptoms in the past two weeks, this could indicate a COVID infection coming on the heels of some other virus, so we may need to rule out COVID even though some of the symptoms have been present for > 2 weeks.

“Potential Symptoms” include:

  • Fever or chills

  • Cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing

  • Fatigue

  • Muscle or body aches

  • Headache

  • New loss of taste or smell

  • Sore throat

  • Congestion or runny nose

  • Nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea

See this page for more information about COVID-19 symptoms.

Same-day appointments

For urgent needs, same-day appointments are available Monday through Friday. Please call as early in the day as possible, the more notice we have the easier it is to fit everyone in. 

Need help outside of office hours?

Firstly, if your child has an emergency, please call 911 or go directly to the ER - they will contact us if needed once your child has been evaluated.

Urgent Care centers can also be helpful when something needs to be seen outside of office hours but it's not an emergency. 

For our list of preferred Urgent Cares and ERs, see our resources page.

And if you have something that might need urgent attention but you're not sure/don't know what to do, we can help: