Sharing her experience of first covering the emerging COVID-19 pandemic story, and then battling it, reporter Aria Bendix says that if she has learned one thing from covering the coronavirus pandemic, it’s to prepare for the worst.
Global cases of the novel coronavirus have already crossed the one million mark, with the death toll rising in the United States and western Europe, leaving the world economy in shambles.
Against this grim scenario, many are struggling to get treatment owing to the acute shortage of testing kits and health infrastructure. When the first positive case was reported from New York on March 1, Bendix, however, swiftly bought two weeks’ worth of supplies and a 30-day stock of medicines.
Two days later, her body began to hurt, Bendix writes in a column for Business Insider. She knew that the timing of the pain was a bit off, but was relieved by the fact that she was not experiencing any of the primary symptoms of the virus, like fever, dry cough or difficulty in breathing.
She was also aware that individuals who are most likely to develop severe symptoms are older men with underlying health conditions. “Since I check none of those boxes, I wondered whether my illness was psychosomatic. But doctors had told me that every person is vulnerable to infection,” she writes.
Things took a turn for the worse when she started experiencing chills. The pain, she recounts, felt like she had just run a marathon and then been struck by a car. It was then that she decided to self-isolate.
In the weeks that followed, Bendix writes that her reporting helped her comprehend what was happening to her. But nothing, she says, could have readied her for the harrowing experience of sitting alone in the emergency room, gasping for breath.
A week after her symptoms surfaced, she began experiencing heavy pressure on her ribcage. “My breathing felt heavy. I scheduled a virtual appointment with a doctor, who told me to go to urgent care if my symptoms worsened,” she writes.
The one-mile walk to the urgent care left her, who runs six miles every Saturday, struggling for breath. She could not even manage to walk from her bedroom to the bathroom without feeling exhausted.
“When I arrived [at the facility], I was given a face mask and escorted to a waiting room. No one else was there, and the doctor saw me almost immediately,” Bendix says.
The doctor confirmed to her what she already felt she knew – that in all likelihood she had Covid-19.
However, the urgent care clinic was not testing. She was then taken by the doctor to check her oxygen levels, where she was asked to walk and talk simultaneously.
She was then given two options – she could be carried by an ambulance to the emergency room or she could go home and wait for the symptoms to subside.
“Having written about the US's coronavirus testing issues I knew that New York's capacity was woefully limited,” Bendix says. And so, she decided to go home and lie down.
By the evening, her pain became unbearable and she was driven by her friend to the ER. “Both of us wore face masks,” she adds. She waited for close to an hour and was then taken to a pressure-controlled room. After the doctors arrived, she was told that there was nothing they could do to treat her symptoms.
“The fact that I could speak full sentences was a good sign, she (the doctor) said. In fact, she added, I was an example of why young people with mild cases needed to stay home,” Bendix writes.
Data from New York City health department reveals that people under age 44 make up about a fifth of the city's coronavirus hospitalizations and the majority of the city's diagnosed cases, the report says. Out of the over 36,000 cases that were seen at the end of March, more than 15,000 were among those aged between 18 to 44.
“My case is far from an anomaly. But as far as the data is concerned, it doesn't exist,” Bendix says. Before she was discharged, the doctor asked her to return if her condition worsened. “I could barely imagine what that would feel like,” she adds.
After a week of troubled breathing and disturbed nights, Bendix began feeling like she could breathe normally, but developed a sore throat. By day 14, her aches made a surprise return, but she felt that she was limping back to normalcy.
Talking about her experience, Bendix says that she had prepared for this to “become a reality.” She adds that her political leaders, however, had not.
"There was so much optimism at the beginning," Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was quoted as saying in the report. "There was not a sense of urgency in the government writ large. People were downplaying the risks and telling people that there wasn't reason to be concerned."
Alex Greninger, assistant director of the University of Washington Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory, told Business Insider that it would have been helpful to know if the coronavirus was spreading here.
"Unfortunately it took real morbidity and mortality. It took the Italians. It took spread in Europe… It also takes death, or at least the imminent possibility of it, to be admitted to a hospital or receive a test in New York City,” Greninger was quoted as saying.
Given the bleak scenario, Bendix concludes that she is grateful that she didn’t need either of these.
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