Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Surviving COVID-19 inspired Josie Smith-Malave to run for Wilton Manors mayor.
Five days after losing her sense of taste and smell, chef Josie Smith-Malave sat at home in Wilton Manors, seeking the comfort of friends at a virtual cocktail hangout in late March. She prayed it was allergies. Halfway through a toast, her doctor called.
When she rejoined the video call, her face was a picture of confusion. “Guys,” she began, smile wavering. “I just got a call back and I tested positive.”
Over the next month, the onetime Bravo “Top Chef” contestant battled mild COVID-19 symptoms at home with her mother and wife, Marcy Miller, who both refused to evacuate. After 30 days of feeling healthy and asymptomatic – save a residual cough – she started plotting to reopen her Wilton Manors champagne and oyster restaurant, Bubbles & Pearls, for takeout and delivery. Her doctor said it wasn’t necessary but she took another COVID-19 test on May 1.
To her surprise, she tested positive – again. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, how is that even possible?” Smith-Malave, 45, recalls. “I felt fine, like I could bike up and down the beach.”
Her doctor suspects SmithMalave is no longer infected. Across China and South Korea, CNN reports health officials are discovering coronavirus patients still testing positive weeks after recovering from COVID-19. In Smith-Malave’s case, nasal swabbing picked up “remnants” of dead bacteria in her body, which
“probably” triggered a false-positive, her doctor told her.
“There’s not a chance of me being re-infected because I haven’t left the house in 46 days, except to take a calming drive in my car by myself with the sunroof down,” says Smith-Malave, who took a COVID-19 antibody test last week. “My doctor says I have antibodies, which would indicate I recovered from COVID. But does that make me immune? Can I get re-infected? I just don’t know.”
So Smith-Malave remains quarantined – at least, until her follow-up test scheduled for May 15. If given the all-clear, she plans to re-open Bubbles & Pearls on May 18 as a takeout-only restaurant.
Surviving COVID-19 has stoked another of SmithMalave’s
ambitions: To fight the disease in a leadership role. This week, she filed paperwork to run for mayor of Wilton Manors.
‘Spouses don’t stay apart.’
Smith-Malave’s symptoms never felt life-threatening enough for hospitalization. “For three or four days I couldn’t move at all or talk. It felt like having a gorilla on my chest and shoulders,” she says. “I couldn’t smell or taste anything for 28 straight days, but I could still cook with muscle memory.”
Smith-Malave has lived in Wilton Manors since 2014, after a 20-year career working in
celebrated kitchens from New York to San Francisco, and globetrotting as a contestant on “Top Chef” seasons 2, 3, 5 and 10. She grew up in working-class Hialeah as the daughter of divorced parents – a Filipino father and a Puerto RicanItalian mother – and entered culinary school at the Art Institute in New York. She married Miller in November 2017.
Still confined at home, Smith-Malave focuses her energy on positivity, daily meditation and cooking, switching off the news to assuage the ball of anxiety in her stomach. She’s careful to isolate from her mom, who’s “like a teenager because she’s stubborn and strong-headed,” says SmithMalave with an infectious guffaw that turns into a light coughing fit.
“It’s miraculous. My wife and mom have tested negative this entire time,” she says. “We all prepared to get it. We signed up for it. But they haven’t shown any symptoms at all.”
Life inside their threebedroom involves heavy sanitation to avoid infecting her mother and wife, especially in their shared bathroom. Smith-Malave and Miller continue to share a bed, but around her mother – whose age places her at higher risk of contracting COVID-19 – she wears a mask.
“With Marcy, she’s like, ‘I’m in this with you,’ ” Smith-Malave recalls. “Think of Tom Hanks and his wife, Idris Elba and his wife. Spouses don’t stay apart.”
“I knew she was in a panic state,” adds Miller, who co-owns Bubbles & Pearls. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m just going to be here when she’s happy, mad, scared, and make sure she’s fed and nourished and loved on.”
Whenever she could summon the energy, SmithMalave devoted her quarantine to contact-tracing detective work. She figures she contracted COVID-19 from one of four locations. She discounts the first two – a CVS Pharmacy and Publix in Wilton Manors – but may have caught it during a March 6 memorial service for former Wilton Manors Mayor Justin Flippen, who died in February. (“We were embracing and hugging and crying,” she says.)
Another likely source of transmission is her late friend Ronny Brenesky, who co-hosted a weekly LGBTQ talk show called “It’s Happening Out” with Smith-Malave.
“Ronny called me one day saying, ‘Josie, I’m pretty positive I have COVID, and it’s serious. Don’t underestimate this virus,” SmithMalave recalls. “A few days later, he got placed into ICU and I got my COVID test. Thirty-two days later, his heart gave out. It hit me really hard.”
Light a fire
The death of Brenesky seemed to “light a fire under Josie,” Miller recalls. The part-time painter (she specializes in pet portraits) says she doesn’t know how her wife found the confidence to share her COVID-19 struggle with the public. “I would die of embarrassment,” Miller says. “Getting COVID is like wearing a red scarlet letter. People are scared to be around you. If I showed her I was scared – and I was – I was afraid her confidence would waver.”
Pre-pandemic, SmithMalave planned to run for a Wilton Manors city commission seat in November. But recovering from COVID-19 has “reignited” her, Smith-Malave says. On May 13, she filed paperwork to run for mayor.
“The post-COVID moment will be really difficult for our businesses, but it’s important to spread the truth and facts, not rumors, so we don’t wind up locking down this country for another three months,” Smith-Malave says. “I share my story because we can learn together, use my data and eradicate this virus.”
She also spent her selfquarantine revamping the Bubbles & Pearls takeout menu. She won’t open at half capacity until she’s comfortable.
She says the restaurant will transform from a sitdown eatery into a “casual crab shack,” serving garlic crab legs, shrimp cocktails and oysters on the half shell to go.
“It will cost us more to be open instead of doing takeout,” Smith-Malave says. “The lesson I’ve learned from this disease is we need more testing. Why did I test positive twice 40 days apart? There are too many unknowns. Everyone is eager for a return to normal but we’re not ready.”