AUSTIN (KXAN) — As of Wednesday evening there have been 305 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Austin Travis County. Thirty-year-old Austin Meador, who lives in the city he shares a name with, says he’s among those 305 cases.

Meador has known he’s had the novel coronavirus for more than a week now, and as someone who is young and active, he is surprised with how long the recovery process has taken.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says based on information that is available, it appears that the time from exposure to the novel coronavirus to when symptoms start can range between two and 14 days.

The CDC also noted that reports of COVID-19 illnesses have ranged from mild symptoms to severe illness, to death. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, people with mild cases seem to recover in one to two weeks and for those with severe cases, recovery may take six weeks or longer.

Meador believes his case is tied to a trip he took earlier this month. He and a few friends had been planning for months to go to Costa Rica. As the trip date approached, his parents expressed some worry, but Meador believed everything would be fine.

“I thought, worst case scenario if it does happen we’ll just fly back early,” he said. “We were hearing reports that it doesn’t really impact young people.”

The CDC notes that people who are older are more at risk for COVID-19, complications with COVID-19, and death as a result of COVID-19. But as Austin Public Health pointed out Tuesday, young people are not immune from severe illness or death as a result of the novel coronavirus. In fact, in the 305 cases in Austin-Travis County Wednesday evening, 50% are cases involving people ages 20 through 40.

Meador stayed in Costa Rica through the March 18 when he and his friends returned to Austin. In airports on the way back, he recalled seeing many people who looked sick, wearing masks and were coughing.

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Upon landing on March 18, Meador said, he “didn’t really feel normal… just felt tired, my throat hurt. I kind of had body aches.”

But at first he assumed all those symptoms were due to exhaustion. In the days following, he had shortness of breath, a cough, and pain in his chest.

By March 20, Meador was talking with some friends and recalled, “it got so bad, I could barely get a word out, and they were both like, ‘You need to go to a hospital, you can barely breathe.'”

Meador went to an Austin hospital where he said he was “taken to the back right away.”

Medical personnel checked his blood and oxygen levels and ran a chest x-ray. Meador also recalled being tested for flu and strep throat. Within four hours, he said the medical team deemed him critical enough to take the COVID-19 test.

“They said that I needed to because the breathing, it was just so bad, I could just not get a breath, that was probably the worst it got,” Meador said.

By the next day he was told he’d tested positive. The doctors told him they weren’t going to put him on a breathing treatment because it wouldn’t have been good for his lungs. Meador said he was told to go home and quarantine for fourteen days and check back in with medical staff if he got worse.

So by March 21, Meador headed back to his Austin home where he has been ever since. He lives in a house with roommates and while his roommates bring him food, he stays isolated in his room for the most part.

Meador said that he wasn’t leaving home at all immediately after he returned from Costa Rica, either. So the past few weeks have consisted of a lot of time alone in his bedroom.

He said his shortness of breath lasted for seven days and that he had a cough for about five of those days. Still, he notices tightness in his chest and his breathing is not 100% back to normal, but he is glad to be able to get to sleep easier now.

His friends who went on the Costa Rica trip with him don’t appear to have the virus, one tested negative for it and another hasn’t showed any symptoms.

Meador has been grateful for the people who have called to check in on him. His parents drove all the way from Lubbock to drop off food for him and say hi to him through the window.

As someone who regularly works out, Meador has been trying to get back into the swing of exercising.

“Three days ago I did like 20 minutes of lightweight curls and triceps and a few sit-ups and I felt like I was going to pass out,” he said. “That was enough to put me in bed for the whole day.”

“That’s the one negative thing is that I think the recovery for me is gonna take longer than I thought it would,” he added.

Meador plans to continue to stay at home even after his fourteen-day quarantine has finished. He feels lucky to have had symptoms that appear to be on the decline and worries about what the risk would be if he passed along the virus to someone who was elderly or had a preexisting medical condition.

“I would say the younger people aren’t taking this seriously and they’re the ones that are probably out and about more often in their everyday lives,” Meador said.

“It is harder to quarantine and change your lifestyle, but I would encourage everyone to.”