As more hospitals open drive-up screening and testing sites for COVID-19, the question of who can get tested is on the minds of many.

The Idaho Bureau of Laboratories, the state lab under the Department of Health and Welfare, announced Wednesday that to maintain a 24-hour turnaround time, it would only test specimens from hospitalized patients and those deemed to be "high priority for public health purposes." All other samples must be sent to commercial labs.

The state lab is only capable of running 60 COVID-19 tests per day, according to reporting done by the Idaho Statesman. And out-of-state testing has been slammed by the demand as well.

While St. Luke's and Saint Alphonsus have made strides in testing capabilities in the past few days as they opened drive-up test sites, they still have stringent requirements for whose eligible to be tested. Specimens will be sent to commercial labs already stressed by the influx of samples.

That testing crunch has been felt for a while.

One small business owner in the Boise-area said Monday she had been trying to get tested for several days after she and her husband had both fallen ill with many of the symptoms of COVID-19. She wished to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

"Basically, unless someone is showing life-threatening symptoms or can actually show they were in contact with a confirmed case," they won't be tested, she said over the phone.

"I have all the symptoms," she said, ticking off fever, aches, pains, fatigue and coughing.

After both she and her husband had been sick for several days, she called her medical provider.

"We're both in our 60s, we both have underlying health concerns … and that made me worried," she said. "So I called the health care provider and spoke with a physician's assistant, who said you have to meet five criteria to be tested, and one of those is contact with a confirmed case of the coronavirus."

The Treasure Valley business-owner said she was frustrated with the government's "poor planning" for testing people for COVID-19.

"It's been in China since December, and we don't have kits here to put people on notice as soon as possible," she said.

Calls to Central Public Health and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare were not returned Thursday.

One of the people the business owner has been in contact with recently got sick, and through her own version of contact-tracing found someone who had tested positive for the novel coronavirus. That will let her get a test, as she would have been in contact with someone who has a confirmed case of COVID-19.

While that test might happen for her, she said the current response to the pandemic wasn't enough.

"Somehow we really fell down," she said.