The Guilt of Being a Covid-19 Survivor

As one of the first coronavirus carriers in New York City, I’m haunted by the idea that I may have infected others

Photo courtesy of the author

As one of the first people in the country to contract Covid-19, I felt like I was snatched up by an invisible claw, the unlucky winner of a twisted lottery. “There’s no way that this is the coronavirus,” my roommate said after my fever broke 103 and the delirium began to set in. “Nobody in NYC even has it.” He wasn’t far off. On March 11, the day I first came down with coronavirus symptoms, there were only 52 confirmed cases in the whole city.

I am a healthy 27-year-old, and at that point in early March, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I could catch this virus. Like much of the guidance I received from official sources in the early days of the pandemic, the public’s understanding of it was incomplete, at best. This was before President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency. Before New York state went into lockdown. Before the cumulative total of coronavirus cases in New York City topped 77,000, as it did this week, with so many dead that the bodies are being hauled away in refrigerated trucks, like morgues on wheels.

It took me one week to fully recover from the coronavirus — or at least I think. It’s been a month since the beginning of my ordeal, yet I still don’t know whether I’m officially non-contagious. But as one of the first people infected during the global pandemic’s arrival to the U.S., there is one thing I do know: Countless numbers of my fellow survivors are about to feel immense and unprecedented guilt.

I’m now haunted by the idea that I ventured out into the world too soon.

As one of the first people in a dense city to have the plague, I’ve come to see myself as the root of a poison tree. Now that I’ve emerged from the daze of these past few weeks, I can’t stop speculating how many people I may have inadvertently infected. It wasn’t until I was severely ill with a virus the world has never seen that I realized, in the midst of this crisis, the people in charge simply didn’t have the answers. Not the doctors. Not the insurance companies. And definitely not the president. In my failed attempts to get clear guidance from the authorities, I realized that I was truly alone here. Each person who was infected early on, like me, was a live wire, and institutional failures from the top down turned us into ideal vessels for this virus’s exponential growth.

I felt this acutely during the height of my illness, when I was instructed to walk into the heart of a crowded and woefully underprepared emergency room. It shocked me that the hospital did not have precautions in place to isolate those who may be infected. I told the receptionist that I had gone to an urgent care clinic and likely had Covid-19, yet I was corralled into the ER’s common waiting room, where those with minor injuries and unrelated illnesses were mixed with potential carriers like me. I did my best to self-isolate: I maintained a distance from others, kept my mask and gloves on, and sanitized my hands often. I debated whether I should let the other patients know that I might be infected for their own safety. It felt like my only option was to stay quiet, so I slunk into the corner, scared and ashamed to be carrying this sickness.

After what felt like hours of tests and waiting in the bustling common area, a nurse prompted me to track down my doctor to follow up on the X-ray results of my lungs. “Walk through that door. He’s in there,” she said as she buzzed the door open. “Hurry up, go in.” I stepped into a densely populated ward and saw the room filled with least a hundred people — patients, nurses, and doctors. Frozen, I pressed my back against the wall, trying to distance myself from anyone and everyone. So many people. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. Why am I here?

When the first wave of the pestilence crashed down, there were no guidelines, no protocols, not even enough test kits to go around. Had the government sounded the alarm sooner, our medical professionals might have been adequately prepared to protect themselves and their patients. But instead, those on the frontlines were forced to work in death’s shadow, becoming both the victims and perpetrators of the virus’ spread.

Many of the decisions I made during my illness hinged on whether I could financially afford to take every possible precaution. Before heading to the urgent care center, I had to first spend feverish hours on the phone with my insurance company, struggling to determine whether my policy would cover a visit. I imagine that others who were more ill had it even worse off — the cruelty of succumbing to illness in your living room while your insurance company’s on-hold music fills your ears.

The only confirmation I received was that I “should be covered” for a test. When my condition went from bad to worse, and I heard the panic in my general practitioner’s voice as she urged me to rush to the ER, I weighed how much money an ambulance ride would cost me. I didn’t have hours to spend on the phone with insurance again, and I couldn’t risk infecting an Uber driver or taking public transit. So I walked.

My condition improved when my fever finally broke five days into my infection. When I woke up, my sheets were absolutely soaked with sweat and I felt like death incarnate, but my temperature was a healthy 98.9. Within a few days, the deathbed exhaustion subsided, my headache vanished, and my sense of smell and taste slowly returned. But I still wasn’t clear on what I should do next.

My positive test results came back a full eight days after I had first gone to the urgent care clinic. In that time, I’d received a flood of contradictory information. The doctor who had administered the test told me I should self-quarantine for seven days from the onset of my symptoms, yet the outpatient documents they handed me at the same clinic said my isolation should last two weeks. Then, according to the health care worker who delivered my test results over the phone, enough time had passed for me to come out of quarantine. Did this mean I was no longer contagious? I assumed so, but there was no way to be sure.

I’m now haunted by the idea that I ventured out into the world too soon. The day after being told I could come out of quarantine, I made a trip to a local Home Depot to pick up equipment for a home project. I was ecstatic to leave my apartment, but when I arrived at the store, it was packed. Nobody seemed to be obeying the recommended six feet of social distancing — especially not in the long checkout line. Later that night, I had to be honest with myself. What if I was still contagious in that store today? Did I leave my home simply because the clinic told me what I wanted to hear?”

I am guilty of blindly trusting the powers that be to know what to do when the floodwaters rise.

Entire populations across the world are currently bracing for imminent grief, financial devastation, and the suffocating effects of long-term isolation. But in their wake will come guilt. The guilt of doctors who will have to make impossible decisions about who lives and dies. The guilt of health organizations and governmental bodies who were slow to create cohesive guidelines and unified public messaging in time. The lack of guilt from the president, who said “I don’t take responsibility at all.” And most essentially, my own guilt. I am guilty of blindly trusting the powers that be to know what to do when the floodwaters rise.

Now, when I look out of my apartment window into the Brooklyn night and see ambulances parked outside nearby buildings, I feel that I’ve played a role in it all. Who knows if there are people that will die — and perhaps there are some who already have — who can be directly traced to me. Wherever the guilt for that blame lies, I have to bear it all the same.