Even young can get virus, 22-year-old tells others
22-year-old man shares COVID-19 experience
The first Ottawa Amazon employee to contract the novel coronavirus is speaking out as a cautionary tale to young people to heed the warnings from public health officials and to know that it’s not just the elderly who are getting sick.
But 22-year-old Alois Nashali, unlike many of those in long-term care homes where COVID-19 is ravaging patient populations, is fully recovered from the virus.
It was on March 19, the same day he worked his last shift at the Carlsbad Springs fulfilment centre, that he started to feel unwell.
“I didn’t have all the coronavirus symptoms. I had a little bit of a dry cough and that was it. They couldn’t test me if I didn’t have enough symptoms to show if it’s something close to corona,” he said. “I decided to self-isolate.”
That meant taking unpaid leave from his job at the Boundary Road facility where he has worked in quality and inventory control since August 2019. He was among the second group of people hired on to work at the facility, which opened in the summer of 2019.
On March 31, he said he woke up feeling like he’d never felt before.
“I had a fever, and my body was feeling very fatigued,” he said.
“At first I just thought I had a flu, but I could just feel like this is something else because I’ve had the flu before. I was actually in pain: all my joints, my back, my knees. I couldn’t get out of my bed. It just came like that. It just came all at once.”
He went to the COVID-19 testing facility at Brewer Park. “I explained my situation and they decided to give me a test, and the results came back on April 3, and it was positive.”
A nurse phoned him to give him his result and asked how he was feeling; at that moment he was having pretty severe chest pain and was told to call 911 or to go to the nearest emergency room. He went to the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital, where he was told his pain was from inflammation. He was told to continue taking Tylenol and to isolate from others in his house.
Nashali lives with his two brothers. They, along with his mother and two sisters, immigrated to Canada from Kenya in 2016.
He told his employer that same day and within 24 hours Amazon notified all employees at its YOW1, a facility of nearly one-million square feet, that the site had its first positive COVID-19 case. The company has called to check in on Nashali and his health.
After he was diagnosed, Nashali was starting to feel better, but then he would find his symptoms worsening. “At night, all the symptoms would hit me again. The nights were nightmares,” he said.
His fever would spike, but, with no thermometer in the house, he can’t say how high, just that he felt like he was “boiling.”
“I’ve never been that sick before,” he said.
Nashali said he has no idea where he might’ve contracted the virus. He hadn’t travelled anywhere and, at the time he first started feeling unwell, he was only going to work and the grocery store.
He said he had a misconception that there wasn’t a health risk to people like him, but knows better now. “I just want (young people) to know it could happen to anybody.” syogaretnam@postmedia.com twitter.com/shaaminiwhy