Day 1: 9/6/20
“It’s Sunday, September 6th. I have been trying to be fairly careful under the new COVID-19 rules and regulations. However, I have not been staying home completely. Some friends and I went out to dinner last Friday night, September 4th. Now my group of friends that I was with is concerned we were exposed to the virus when we were out to eat. Personally, at this moment I think they are being paranoid, and I do not believe we were exposed. However, they plan to get tested tomorrow.”
Day 2: 9/7/20
“Today, my friends got tested for COVID-19. To my surprise, 4/8 of them came back positive; this included my roommate. Now of course I realize they are not paranoid and they were more on track that I had predicted. However, it’s odd… we were all together and yet only some of the group tested positive for the virus. Yet, since we were all potentially exposed we must quarantine to make sure symptoms of the virus do not develop later on.
My friends who tested positive also had to share their track of who they had been in contact with. This means I was now getting calls from contact tracers. The contact tracers job is to call people who were potentially exposed to hopefully stop the chain of exposure. Now I have found myself in quarantine… with my infected roommate.
Day 3: 9/8/20
I still have had no symptoms of the virus. My roommate and I have been extremely careful to wipe down door knobs, clean the bathroom and kitchen (which we share), and mainly stay quarantined in our rooms so she does not infect me. At this point, I am questioning… How did I not get the virus? Yet, I am not the only one. My four other friends who were just as equally exposed did not get it either. With the virus being so new, I guess no one has answers as to why some are more susceptible than others at this point.
I made myself a nice dinner tonight, did laundry, did homework, and felt fine. Just as the day crept into the evening, I began to experience muscle aches (a symptom of COVID-19). I am not totally concerned at this point. Muscle aches can have a lot of causes including pulling a muscle, or simply even sleeping in a funny position. The muscle aches were not terrible, and even ignorable at this point. However, I began to be a bit concerned considering my surroundings and friends experiences around me.”
Day 4: 9/9/20
“Day 4… Wednesday, September 9th. I slept. And slept… And slept some more. Something wasn’t right. I finally pulled myself out of bed for the first time that day at 6:30pm, just to use the bathroom and put some food in my stomach. By 7:00pm, I was exhausted from that little bit of activity and back in bed for the night. I had come to the realization at this point, it was time to schedule a COVID-19 test. My test was scheduled for the following day, but I had a pretty good hunch of how it was going to go. The craziest part of this virus and the way it affected me personally was how quickly the symptoms crept on me. Out of nowhere almost! Just when I thought I was safe.”
Day 5: 9/10/20
“The following day was similar to the day before, I was still very very fatigued. However, today I had to force myself out of bed in order to get my COVID-19 test. Sure enough, as expected, the test came back positive. Now knowing I was positive for COVID-19, my fatigue and muscle ache symptoms made sense. However, I had already been quarantined since the past Sunday, September 6th, since my roommate and friends were infected, potentially exposing me. When I got back to my apartment, my roommate and I stopped our isolation towards each other since we were both positive at this point and began congregating in our common area together again. However, of course we still could not leave our apartment.”
Day 6: 9/11/20
“By this point, I actually woke up feeling a lot better today. I still had muscle aches, and my headaches were horrible. However, my extreme fatigue was lessening which made a big difference. I was still able to keep up with my school work considering it was all online, which was good. Yet, as expected it just wasn’t the first thing on my mind while being so sick. I wouldn’t say I fell too behind in my school work because I knew that wasn’t an option for me. However, I do think my symptoms, especially the migraine made it very hard to focus on a computer all day. I had felt like I got beat up by this virus.”
Day 7: 9/12/20
“The only positive I would say is that at least my roommate and I had each other. I was miserable enough in complete quarantine for 14 days, and I wasn’t even alone. I feel very bad for people who were isolated by themselves. Once my roommate and I symptoms began to lesson, we still had to properly finish out our quarantine so we did not potentially infect anyone else. We spent our time in quarantine ordering a lot of delivered food, and spending a lot of time on our couch. It got BORING, quick. We watched a lot of movies, caught up on school work, and that’s about it; but at least we had each other.”