Corinavirus and Me (and You)

by Robert McGarvey

On March 23rd I took to bed with fever and worse. Ten days later I woke up and the fever had broken. Four weeks later – today is April 30 – I am still regaining my strength.

I have never been sick for nine days and I am a Medicare recipient who has suffered all the usual, mundane illnesses. But never for nine days

Did I have coronavirus aka Covid-19? I do not know and that is the damnable reality. It is what scares me. It is what should scare you.

I had the range of coronavirus symptoms. A fever (102F most times I checked and that was with Tylenol lowering it). I woke just about every night drenched in sweat. Then there were chills. A nagging cough. A sore throat some days. No taste – I lost 10 pounds. Mainly I slept, 16, 18 hours a day. My main memory of how I felt: very tired, very weak.

One day my wife asked me, “If you need to go to the hospital which one do you prefer?”

That is a creepy question to be asked. But I answered it because, just maybe, I might have needed to go.

I never did, nor did I see a primary care physician. Why bother? There are no drugs available (and, no, I have no interest in injecting Lysol). My breathing seemed okay (if occasionally labored). When I checked advisory sites they all said, stay put and so I did. I self-quarantined for three weeks because, really, that was all I could do.

Did I want a Covid-19 test? Sure. But I live in Arizona and a month ago we were close to a test-free zone. Still today, we lag in testing. In fact we rank last.

I would have needed a doctor’s prescription and also prayer that a space was available at one of the handful of testing facilities in Phoenix (the nation’s fifth biggest city, by the way). Tests were largely limited to health care workers, first responders, and the gravely ill. I opted to leave the tests for those who needed them more.

As of April 30, there have been 71,786 tests in Arizona. The population is 7.3 million.

But here’s the disturbing reality: The state says there have been 7648 cases in Arizona and 320 deaths. Both numbers are rubbish.

No one knows how many cases there have been because there has been essentially no testing.

Sure, the White House had insisted, for weeks, that there were plenty of tests. But that was – your pick – a lie or a failure to understand the reality on the ground where most states continue to grapple with inadequate supplies of test kits.

Bad numbers are not just an Arizona problem. They are a national problem and a result of a failure of the White House to use its powers to kickstart the supply chain to produce tests in the numbers we need (but does use them to force meat packing plants to stay open).

We need to triple the amount of testing we are doing, experts say. The Rockefeller Foundation says we need around three million tests a week, growing to 30 million per week. We are doing one million.

That’s important because without adequate testing we cannot safely re-open the economy. Not in Arizona, not anywhere in the US.

In Arizona the governor is under intense pressure to re-open the economy. Doing so would be suicide, a reality experts agree on because testing has been so inadequate.

That’s true in just about every state (New York, Massachusetts, and Louisiana are leaders in testing). Re-opening states and ending social distancing is about as smart as playing Russian roulette after downing a bottle of Stoli.

In Arizona, if the governor re-opens the economy on May 15, which seems plausible, I will personally ignore that decree and carry on with my own social distancing. My health, indeed my life may depend on it.

Do I have immunity because I say I had the disease? You probably are asking precisely that question because if I have immunity I can go mingle with huge crowds with nary a fear.

It’s a good question but it is impossible to say right now. Antibody tests that measure if a person has had the coronavirus are proving unreliable – many false positives appear to result and that is a dangerous turn because it may lead people to believe they have immunity.

And another thing we do not know is how much, if any, immunity is in fact conveyed by having had the disease. Nobody knows right now.

Let’s review:

• We do not know how many cases of coronavirus there have been in the US
• We do not have a way to test to see if a person has had it
• We do not know how many died from it
• We do not know what immunity a person who in fact had the disease may have

Add that up and you would be right if you say we don’t know bupkis.

And that’s a shame – for a disease that first surfaced six months ago, that has killed 231,000, and that is known to have infected 3.3 million of us globally.

Ignorance can kill. It’s happening right now in America. And it will happen at a vastly larger scale as state economies open prematurely and without adequate test data.

I will keep myself safe. Do likewise.