West Cook News

Kathy Griffin, Oak Park native and comic, blames President Donald Trump for lying about the pandemic's severity after a hospital refused to test her for coronavirus.

After her release from Cedars-Sinai for an abdominal infection, Griffin says that during her treatment, which lasted one day, she was not tested.

In a tweet from her hospital room, Griffin accused President Donald Trump of lying about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying she knows he is lying because she was “sent to the #COVID19 isolation ward room in a major hospital ER from a separate urgent care facility after showing UNBEARABLY PAINFUL symptoms. The hospital couldn’t test me for #coronavirus because of CDC (Pence task force) restrictions.”

She was responding to Trump's tweet that stated “the United States has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far!”—asserting the U.S. has done more than South Korea in an eight-week period.

She continued her tweets on March 26, noting that she was speaking to a news outlet via phone interview and sharing that she was on medication for the infection,"though she won’t know whether she’s turned the corner for a couple of days." 

Griffin shared she is back home and not going out anytime soon.

“I remember vividly the doctor telling me…'I’m going to send you to Cedars ER today, because I don’t think I could get you in 13 days from now,'” said Griffin. She also tweeted that someone at Cedars said they could not test her "because of the CDC guidelines.” She suggested the guidelines are still too strict because they don’t have enough tests.

In the tweets, Griffin only said she had "a slew of symptoms,' not explaining them or whether she had the symptoms of COVID-19, which include a dry cough, tightness and pain in the chest, trouble breathing and a fever.

Griffin is currently mourning the death of her mother, Maggie, who died on March 17 at the age of 99. Maggie Griffin had worked as an administrator at Oak Park Hospital.