Don’t know anyone who has dealt with COVID-19?

Don’t know anyone who has dealt with COVID-19?

Posted on August 13th, 2020 by Scott Warnock

As the rate of COVID cases in the U.S. continues to rise, I’m struck by the number of people I speak with who say, honestly, that they don’t know or haven’t heard from anyone who has personally dealt with it.

Well, if you were one of those people, the moment you started reading this, that changed. My family has had to deal with COVID-19. My wife and 19-year-old son both got sick, both got tested, and both were positive.

My son, who hadn’t been feeling well, got tested at about 10:30 in the morning and received the bad news a few hours later. My wife then went to a different testing center with my younger son; it took several days for her results to be sent to her.

My son was sick for a few days but pulled a quick, full recovery. My wife, an otherwise perfectly healthy person [of indeterminate age], was increasingly slowed up as the days went by. She had the issue/complication of losing her sense of smell. She was lethargic. She spent nearly two weeks in the front room, doing puzzles and getting furious at the news, which couldn’t have helped.

Neither of them had a fever.

Because the other half of our household, my younger son and I, showed no signs, we had to divide up the place like post-WWII Europe.

My younger son ended up being negative, but it took many days for his results to come back negative. I was going to get tested, but my quarantine status was self-isolation, and that was not going to change regardless. Plus, with the long waits they experienced at the testing center, I was reluctant to take up a testing slot for someone who might really need it, and when I did finally did call a center, the person I spoke to pleasantly discouraged me from coming in since I was asymptomatic.

I’ll get an antibody test at some point.

Many of you know our family personally. For some of you the relationship is purely digital. You should of course feel free to have your own macro views about this pandemic, about masks, about rates of infection, about data, about politics.

But if you’ve made it to the bottom of this short piece, you now can’t say, “I don’t even know anyone who’s had to deal with COVID.” If you want further reinforcement of the message, feel free to stop by. But I’ll ask you to keep your distance for just a few more days–and that’ll be for your own good.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.