Life in the Time of Coronavirus

The 40-Year-Old Therapist Who Is Sick With the Virus

A new series about how this pandemic affects our lives, our loved ones, our work, and our way of life

Max Ufberg
GEN
Published in
8 min readMar 19, 2020

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Photo illustration. Image sources: Aleksandr Zubkov/Getty Images, 4x-image/Getty Images.

Life in the Time of Coronavirus is a new GEN series where we are interviewing people across the country who have had their lives upended or who are experiencing the stress of the unknown.

Katherine Zwick is a 40-year-old therapist from Santa Cruz, California. After attending a conference in New York earlier this month she started experiencing a sore throat and periods of fatigue. On Monday she was diagnosed with coronavirus.

II started having symptoms, not particularly publicized symptoms, of Covid on March 7. I didn’t really think about Covid at the time. I just had a runny nose and a sore throat and felt tired. But I was coming off of two weeks of conferences and professional training. It made sense that I would feel run-down.

I got back to Santa Cruz on March 8, and the next day, I was crazy tired. I would get hit with a wave of fatigue and just have to take a nap. So I got in touch with my doctor.

There was a rumor at one of the conferences that someone had left because of exposure to Covid. I told my doctor…

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Max Ufberg
GEN
Writer for

Writer and editor. Previously at Medium, Pacific Standard, Wired