I tested positive for COVID-19 on June 20. This was after five days of trying to get tested in the wake of my mother’s positive test. My experience with COVID-19 was marked not by concern for myself, but for my family. My mother and I survived the virus, but the long-term effects are still unknown, and I will worry about my mother’s health for the rest of my life.
The callous skepticism I faced afterward from many friends and acquaintances put in perspective the damage that President Donald Trump has already done to victims and survivors of COVID-19.
Now, having tested positive for COVID-19 himself, the president continues to make light of the virus, tweeting: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Far too much of our country hasn’t been letting COVID-19 dominate their lives, and that’s why more than 200,000 Americans are dead.
Since his diagnosis at the start of October, Trump has tweeted multiple videos where he claims to be feeling great and touting the quality of our doctors and medicine. The doctors and medicine Trump refers to were nowhere to be found when I tested positive.
The time between my mother and I testing positive and making a recovery was uncertain for my family. Not only did I not receive treatment for the virus, but it took me multiple days to be tested despite my mother testing positive.
For a few days after testing positive I felt nothing. My mom said she was more tired than usual, and the two of us quarantined in our rooms. Sitting alone inside all day gave me plenty of time to overthink and panic about what was going to happen to my family. I worried about my mother getting worse and father catching the virus. Reading the news and social media made me feel ashamed of having the virus. How could we be a part of the problem? Instead of feeling cared for while I was sick, I felt outcast.
My mom tested positive after a trip to the hospital for vertigo. We had been trying to do our part to slow the spread for months, following social distancing guidelines and respecting people’s space.
It felt unfair that this could happen to us. All over the country, people are refusing to distance and acting like the virus is not an issue. But for my family, it was an issue.
What started off as slight fatigue turned into trouble breathing and chills. My symptoms were very short lived: I only felt bad for about five days. My mother, on the other hand, had symptoms for three weeks, which impacted me much more.
Every morning, I was terrified her symptoms would worsen, and every morning I would read more headlines about the climbing U.S. death toll or Trump’s blatant disregard for science. Neither of us ever had a fever, but the difficulty breathing, intense headache, nausea and chills were more than enough to scare me.
Finally, after three weeks of uncertainty, my mom started to recover. I am incredibly lucky to be able to tell this story with a happy ending, but thousands of people are not.
After we recovered and I was able to return to my job at a moving company, I was met with disrespect and skepticism. Many of my coworkers and friends asked me if I really had the virus, and when I confirmed that yes, my mother and I did have COVID-19, they refused to believe it. I heard many different explanations for what the sickness my mother and I felt could have been, from just a normal flu to mental manipulation by the government.
All of these ideas are disrespectful to the families and individuals who lost their lives to COVID-19. All of these ideas are fueled and enabled by Trump.
It is this experience that gives me no sympathy for the president as he continues to downplay this tragedy despite his own positive diagnosis. Every pained breath of our president is penance for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost.