Photo: Johns Hopkins Mapping 2019-nCoV
I have the coronavirus. And it hasn’t been that bad.
I am in my late 60s, and the sickest I’ve ever been was when I had bronchitis several years ago. That laid me out on my back for a few days. This has been much easier: no chills, no body aches. I breathe easily, and I don’t have a stuffy nose. My chest feels tight, and I have coughing spells. If I were at home with similar symptoms, I probably would have gone to work as usual.
I caught the virus on the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that was quarantined outside Yokohama for 14 days, at the end of a 16-day cruise I took with my wife, Jeri. When I left the ship a couple of weeks ago, I felt fine. We checked our temperatures throughout our quarantine. Jeri and I got a swab test for the virus. Our temperatures were normal; they’d get the swab results back in 48 hours. Our test results had not arrived before we boarded buses for the airport, where two U.S. government planes waited for us.
As we took off from Tokyo, I had a bit of a cough, but I chalked it up to the dry air in the cabin. I felt pretty tired – but who wouldn’t, in our situation? I dozed off.
When I woke up, I had a fever. I made my way to the back of the cargo plane, where the Air Force had set up a quarantine area cordoned off with sheets of plastic. They took my temperature. It was over 103 degrees. So I took a seat in the quarantine area and fell back asleep until we touched down in California, at Travis Air Force Base.
Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came onto the plane and said that three of us who had been cordoned off would fly to Omaha (with our spouses, if they wanted to come along). The CDC had a quarantine location at the University of Nebraska’s hospital. We arrived on Feb. 17, greeted by a fleet of ambulances and police cars. Officials put me on a stretcher and wheeled me into a van, which made for a very dramatic scene. I easily could have walked despite my exhaustion.
On the hospital campus, they put me in a biocontainment unit. The space was sealed off, with two double-paned windows that looked out on the hallway, and a large, heavy, insulated door. Two cameras watched me at all times; a set of computer monitors were equipped with microphones, so that the medical staff and I could communicate with CDC officials at central command down the hall. The room had last been used for the Ebola outbreak in 2013.
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SOURCE: The Washington Post, Carl Goldman
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