Member-only story
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
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…
