AAP Voices Blog

On a gorgeous day in early March, I set out on my usual morning commute to the clinic. 

The recent rain had turned the mountains green, there was some fresh snow atop Mount Baldy in the usually dry inland empire of Southern California, and the Lakers had just beaten their rival Clippers the preceding weekend. As I drove to work, I was listening to coverage of the story I had been following for the past few months on PRI’s The World broadcast, regarding the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China.

By this point, it had become a nightmare scenario: Families were stuck in lockdown for weeks, tourists were trapped on cruise ships with no way out, and the virus had already killed thousands. I knew the facts and appreciated the gravity of the situation, but that issue was an ocean away. It wasn’t our problem, right?

Sometimes life comes at you fast. Like most of us, little did I realize how much all of our lives would change in a few short days. Events seemed to move at the speed of light. The virus that began in a Chinese province quickly overwhelmed the infrastructure of the developed world. 

However, as a second-year pediatrics resident, I continued to work. I kept seeing my slated schedule of well child and various acute visits, while spending a larger portion of each visit educating parents on the threat of the novel coronavirus based on the limited information we had. 

While the atmosphere already was tense, the situation escalated on March 19, when Gov. Gavin Newsom issued statewide shelter-at-home orders. I drove home that day feeling a growing level of anxiety about what the future held and also an unusual amount of fatigue. 

I decided to take a nap in preparation for a long night ahead, but after two hours, my head felt as though it weighed a ton. Diffuse myalgias made it difficult for me to stand up. I called in sick that night — and as California’s shelter-at-home drill began, so did mine.

I routinely take care of sick children with viral infections, so I told myself I’d just gotten another bug from one of them. It’s a routine occurrence in the life of a parent or pediatrician. This probably would get better on its own. However, amid the concerns of a growing pandemic, I was advised to see my primary care provider to be cautious. 

Office visits were limited at the Loma Linda family medicine clinic, but I was able to get a video visit that morning. Given my symptoms and our clinical algorithm, I was tested for COVID-19. I stayed in isolation, fatigued and barely eating, over the next two days. Around midnight on March 20, I received a call from the lab confirming that I had tested positive.

The next few days were a whirlwind of phone calls from concerned family and friends as I was the first person they knew who was diagnosed with COVID-19. I also was one of the first in San Bernardino County to have tested positive for the virus.

Everyone asked the same questions: Have you had a fever? Have you had any shortness of breath? Where do you think you got the virus? Thankfully, I didn’t have those symptoms, but I also had no idea where I’d gotten infected. I was confident I would recover, but I wanted to perform the appropriate contact tracing.

A sense of panic initially gripped me as I thought about whom I might have infected. I reached out to everyone I could and hoped that no one else was infected because of me. On March 23, my fiancée, who lives apart from me and works as a surgery resident in Los Angeles, developed symptoms and also tested positive, along with a few other residents I had come in contact with.

Over the coming weeks, my screen time increased to over 9 hours a day as I FaceTimed with my friends, family and fiancée in isolation. Technology was a lifeline at a time when I felt more isolated than I had ever been before. Through our shared quarantine routine, my fiancée and I actually had the opportunity to spend more time together than we had in months. We both recovered day by day, and gradually we were able to smell and taste our food. Thankfully, we never developed respiratory failure. 

Once I started feeling better, I started fielding patient calls and messages from home, which allowed me to feel helpful amid the Netflix binges and novels I was devouring. After two weeks, I received a call from the San Bernardino County health department clearing me from isolation. Mentally and physically, I felt ready to go back to work.

With everyone around me urging me to stay positive, I took that advice quite literally. I tested positive for the virus 10 times in a span of six weeks until finally receiving clearance to return to work six weeks later. I required two consecutive negative nasal swab tests, 24 hours apart, before I was cleared to return to work. 

After testing positive, when is it OK to go back to work? 

Policies vary widely among institutions, and nobody has a clear answer to whether prolonged positive cases are actually infectious. My colleagues and mentors were all rooting for me to come back to work as soon as I could, but no one could be sure when it would be safe for me to return. 

I am now hearing of others who are prolonged positives, as more information is compiled worldwide, but there is still a limited number of cases, estimated to be 1% to 2% of those infected with novel coronavirus. 

As testing becomes widespread, there likely will be many more in the population who will face the new challenge of knowing when they will be cleared to return to work as we reopen the economy.

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*The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the American Academy of Pediatrics.