Before the rest of us were ordered to stay at home, Fanny Laufters and Dylan Boan had already spent two weeks in isolation.
For Laufters, a 27-year-old senior field-marketing manager at Pendo and consummate extrovert, it wasn’t an easy adjustment. She missed walking around the office and seeing people. She missed human interactions. She missed being able to leave their Raleigh home.
For Boan, her 28-year-old fiancé and a UNC law student, it wasn’t that difficult. After all, he didn’t really have a choice. Most of the time, he couldn’t get out of bed if he wanted to.
Laufters had a work conference in Dublin in March that coincided with Boan’s spring break. Laufters says that, with the coronavirus threat looming, her job didn’t pressure her to go, but she didn’t think traveling would be dangerous. They arrived on March 6. Nothing in Dublin seemed out of the ordinary, they say—no social distancing, no stay-at-home order, no business closures.
Until Thursday, March 12, the day before they were supposed to return.
The night before, President Trump had given an Oval Office address announcing a ban on travel from most European countries. Laufters and Boan awoke to a slew of frantic missed calls and texts, including from Boan’s mom, telling them to leave right away.
They didn’t. Getting a flight home a day early would have cost them more than a thousand bucks each, they discovered. Besides, the UK was exempted from the ban, and as American citizens, so were they. The flight back on Friday was uneventful—a layover in Toronto, then to RDU, no hassle getting through customs.
By the time they got home, Boan had a cough—a persistent, dry cough. Then he started to feel bad, that malaise that so often accompanies the flu, but worse. A fever set in. He tried to sleep it off. When he awoke the next morning, he knew something was really, really wrong.
He’d had the flu before, he says. “This was on another level. I felt like I’d been beaten up—like my body weighed another 60 pounds.”
For the next two days, his fever stayed above 101 degrees. The cough wouldn’t stop and couldn’t be controlled. He couldn’t get out of bed.
On Saturday morning, he called UNC Health’s hotline. They told him he was in the queue. On Sunday, he called the state Department of Health and Human Services; they asked if he’d been to one of the three countries then on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list or knew anyone who’d been diagnosed with COVID-19. He hadn’t. The DHHS suggested urgent care.
At urgent care, he tested negative for strep and the flu. The doctor told Boan he’d love to get him tested for COVID-19, but there weren’t any tests available. He suggested the ER. Too expensive, Boan thought. He’d keep plugging away at the hotline.
On Tuesday, he finally got clearance to get tested at an outpatient center on New Bern Avenue. He was told it would be a three-day turnaround. On Friday, he called. Sorry—delays. Finally, on Monday morning, he learned that he did, in fact, have COVID-19. He was to quarantine himself for 15 days from the first symptom or three days from the last, whichever was later. Beyond that, there wasn’t much guidance, he says.
“The first three to four days, you’re bed-bound, your body hurts, you have a fever, you’re lethargic, you don’t do much of anything,” Boan says. After about 72 hours, his fever broke with Tylenol, and then the body aches started to fade. He was tired for a week. As of Friday, he was just beginning to feel like himself again—and to recover his senses of taste and smell, another coronavirus symptom. He still has a cough.
They think Laufters has it, too, though she didn’t get tested; if she does have COVID-19, she’s less symptomatic. Last Monday, the day Boan learned he was positive, Laufters—who’d spent the previous week caring for him—developed a dry cough, congestion, and lost her sense of smell. She called the DHHS hotline, which referred her to the UNC hotline. A nurse on the UNC hotline told her she probably had a cold.
“Did you get the fact that I live with someone who is positive?” Laufters responded.
That changes things, the nurse replied, promising that someone would call her that day. By Friday, no one had called.
That afternoon, after they’d already spent two weeks in quarantine, Governor Cooper announced a stay-at-home order that would last until April 30.
“I do think people are adapting differently,” Boan says. “We’re here for each other. But others definitely have a lot of free time. Other people are struggling to maintain their sense of focus, connection—feeling very isolated by it. I’m staying in touch with family members more than I otherwise would. A big thing is maintaining so much interaction.”
Simple things like walking the dog alleviated the restlessness of staying in the house nonstop, Boan says. For Laufters, keeping a semi-normal routine—things like working out at home—and connecting with people on Facetime, both friends and those she hasn’t spoken to as much as she’d like, help her get by.
“The feeling that we’re feeling is grief,” she says. Isolated people can get sad, so it’s important to check up on your friends.
As a social creature, she admits that she’s found the solitary life a hard adjustment. But she thinks it’s a necessary one.
“I think one of the things—it’s good knowing that, as cliché as it sounds, you can be a hero by staying at home,” she says. “Literally, that is so true. It’s not just about taking care of yourself. Some people are very asymptomatic. If it wasn’t for Dylan, I could think, oh, this is just a cold. That makes me feel like staying at home isn’t all that bad.”
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at [email protected].
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