People who thought they had the novel coronavirus in China would often be sent to a special fever clinic, which have been widespread since the country dealt with an aggressive SARS outbreak in 2002. Their temperature would be taken, and they'd discuss their symptoms, medical history, travel history, and any prior contact with anyone infected with a doctor.
If necessary, patients might receive a CT scan, which is one way to do an initial screening for COVID-19.
"Each machine did maybe 200 a day. Five, 10 minutes a scan," Aylward told the New York Times. "A typical hospital in the West does one or two an hour."
After all that, if you were still a suspect case, you'd get swabbed and a coronavirus PCR test would be run through a machine. Even during the peak of the outbreak, a lot of people came in to the fever clinics with colds, flus, and runny noses, looking for reassurance they didn't have the novel coronavirus.
In the Chinese province of Guangdong, for example, which is a more than 10-hour drive away from Wuhan, there were 320,000 COVID-19 tests done in the clinics. At the peak of the outbreak, only 0.47% of those tests were positive for the coronavirus.
More recently, there's been a massive drop in the amount of people coming to the clinics worried that they're sick.
"According to the national data, fever clinics went from seeing 46,000 people per day at one point, and it's now down to 1,000," Aylward told Vox.