Our Uncertainty is Not Going Away
By: Marta Galambos
Tags: Covid 19, Coronavirus, Covid 19 Testing, Covid Diaries, Uncertainty

My family and I got COVID-19 in March, and it took us months to get tested. Here’s what I’ve learned about uncertainty.

If you get COVID-19 — and I hope you don’t — your first symptom might be a dry cough, or it might be a sore throat. You might not think you have it at first. You might be asymptomatic, or you might get every symptom. Maybe it will take a week to recover, but it might take five weeks or three months. If you want to get tested, it will depend on your local county’s resources, and if you got it early in the pandemic you might not have gotten tested at all. None of these scenarios were hypothetical for my family; we had to navigate uncertainties around symptoms, testing, and more when we got sick with COVID-19 in March. Four months into the coronavirus pandemic, the United States is still facing significant uncertainties with how to handle the crisis. To move forward we all need to act responsibly with an acknowledgement of these uncertainties.

The global coronavirus crisis descended on my family on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 — the evening that President Trump issued a ban on all incoming travel from Europe. My sister, who was spending her junior spring semester studying in Denmark, was woken by her roommate in the middle of the night. In the confusion over whether the travel ban applied to US citizens, she had to scramble to get home before it went into effect. Hours after the travel ban announcement, she was on a plane. Like many Americans, that was the day I started to realize that this problem was too big, too explosive, to wish away.

Over the next four days, the pandemic upended almost every aspect of our lives. My brother, a college freshman, decided to drive home for the weekend until more information was available. The ski resort, which is one of the defining features of my Colorado hometown and where I had been working for the winter after graduating college, was shut down by order of Governor Polis. My mom and I both woke up with a sore throat. Neither of us had a dry cough or trouble breathing, so we doubted it was COVID-19. We hadn’t traveled to any hotspots recently, or known anyone who had been exposed, so how could we have it? My mom suggested it was a sinus infection. Our county declared a state of emergency. My mom’s health worsened and she developed a cough.

On Saturday, March 14, a friend of my mom’s, who had been feeling ill for a few days, found out she had tested positive for COVID-19. After a group of Australian tourists tested positive for the virus, there was a brief window where she and other members of the public were able to get tested. She texted my mom for prayer, and they compared their symptoms: her early symptoms aligned almost exactly with my mom’s. My mom called the county’s coronavirus hotline and was told they were no longer testing. Her symptoms, they said, suggested COVID-19, but they were saving the remaining tests for hospitalized patients. Their instructions for her were to assume she had it, self-isolate at home, and go to the ER if she couldn’t breathe.

Our family’s situation was now apparent. Somehow the novel coronavirus, which first spread through a city almost 7,000 miles away, was in our home, in our lungs.

The same discussions reverberating on the national stage were echoed, with tangible urgency, in our home. How should we get groceries? When would it be safe for my brother to pick up the rest of his things, abandoned in a freshmen dorm room now scheduled to shut down for the rest of the semester? My brother and sister had been home for a few days now; how should we protect them from the virus? We answered the final question with a careful routine of disinfecting and makeshift protective equipment. I wrote down a list of “Quarantine Guidelines” and pinned it to the fridge: my brother, sister and I were each to sign up for nights to disinfect communal surfaces, such as doorknobs and countertops. We decided the family members who had symptoms — my mom, dad and I — would wear gloves and masks whenever we were preparing meals for the family. We found a spare box of disposable gloves in the basement, but masks had long been sold out in the area, so we made do with bandanas (now, of course, the CDC and WHO strongly recommend that everyone wear face masks, but in mid-March those guidelines were not in place). The first night my dad laughed at how ridiculous I looked wearing a pink bandana from my tenth birthday. I laughed too and tried to ignore the growing tightness in my chest.

Our careful self-isolation efforts ended up being insufficient. Five days after arriving home, my sister began exhibiting symptoms. Two days later, my brother followed. Their infection, although disappointing, wasn’t surprising. My brother and sister had already been exposed before we realized we likely had it, and the infected outnumbered the healthy three to two. We half-heartedly continued the daily disinfection routine for another week or so. Wearing the bandanas while cooking now felt futile.

Over the next two weeks, I saw first-hand the insidious quality of COVID-19 that has made it so difficult to contain: symptoms can range from barely noticeable to severe, and each member of my family reacted differently. My sore throat persisted for about five days, and I had one night of fever. For about a week I had a tightness around my chest, but I still was able to do most of my normal activities. My dad’s symptoms were also mild, and my brother exhibited so few outward symptoms that to an outsider he seemed perfectly healthy. My sister experienced the same symptoms with the addition of nausea, but her fatigue and shortness of breath lingered for five weeks. Yet while we each dealt with our varying degrees of mild sickness, we all had to watch helplessly as my mom developed all of the most common symptoms of COVID-19: a dry cough, fever, difficulty breathing, extreme fatigue, body aches, headache, nausea, rash, loss of taste.

Facing an unknown virus with no cure, we tried to rest and eat healthy. On the best days, we cooked together or laughed at memes, enjoying the unexpected reunion. On the worst night, my mom, alarmed by her inability to catch her breath, made sure each of us were awake before my dad rushed her to the ER. She told me later that she wanted to make sure she said goodbye, just in case. Us kids, left behind so we didn’t potentially expose hospital staff to the virus, knelt on the carpet and just prayed. The ER doctors determined that her oxygen levels were strong enough to send her home the same night, but they still weren’t able to give her one of the scarce COVID-19 tests. Instead, she was tested for the flu. When it came back negative, the doctor called to confirm, by process of elimination, what we already knew: she had COVID-19.