Rosa SILVERMAN
As the Trumps ride out the illness ‘together’, those who have done it give Rosa Silverman survival tips
When Sarah’s* symptoms started in mid-march, she was all but sure what they meant. First came a temperature, then a nasty continuous cough. As a GP, the 36-year-old from north London was not going to take any chances and shut herself in her bedroom, safely away from her husband and two young children, to whom she feared spreading the coronavirus.
“I was upstairs on the top floor in our bedroom, with access to my own bathroom,” she says. For seven days, her husband slept downstairs and she didn’t speak to her children in person at all. “My husband cooked and left meals outside my room, mainly frozen ones as he was exhausted from looking after the kids.”
It’s a tricky situation to be in, not least if you have young children. But it becomes trickier still for couples who go down at once, or infect each other, as may be the case with Donald Trump and his wife Melania. The US president announced yesterday that he and the First Lady had both tested positive and were now self-isolating. “We will get through this TOGETHER!” he added, with characteristic bombast. The degree of togetherness he had in mind was, however, unclear.
According to NHS guidelines in Britain, those with symptoms or who have tested positive for Covid-19 should stay away from others in their household “as much as possible”, phraseology that appears to acknowledge the fact that for those who don’t live in the White House, this may be easier said than done.
The advice goes on to say you should stay on your own in one room as much as possible and keep the door closed; avoid using shared spaces, such as the kitchen, at the same time as other people; eat your meals in your room; and use a separate bathroom or else use the bathroom after everyone else and clean it each time.
Inevitably, not everyone will be as diligent as Sarah when it comes to following the guidelines within their own household.
Kate*, a 48-year-old mother of two, also from north London, fell ill with the virus in the spring, shortly followed by her husband. Both felt
‘My husband cooked and left meals outside my room – mainly frozen ones’
very unwell, but parenthood meant that they couldn’t both shut themselves away.
“You’ve still got your kids to look after,” says Kate. “You have to make dinner for them while feeling exhausted and wanting to go to bed, and you end up putting yourself last. Then it takes a lot longer to recover.”
According to experts, Kate was right in assuming there was little point in keeping away from her husband once they were both already ill.
Dr Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter’s College of Medicine and Health, and a communicable disease expert, says: “If you’re a couple and both of you test positive, then there’s very little [point] in keeping your distance from each other. It’s a bit like what you do in a hospital setting: you have your infectious people in the same ward. It makes no difference [to the severity of each patient’s disease].”
If your children have not tested positive, however, that does not mean you shouldn’t try to keep your distance from them, if you can.
“You don’t want to generate a case,” he says, advising that infected parents keep as far as is practicable from their children.
Dr Harriet Leyland, clinical adviser to mygp, a health management and appointment booking app used by almost two million NHS patients, agrees.
“The idea of isolating is to prevent the chain of transmission,” she says. “By isolating together and not having contact with anyone else, the transmission chain will be broken.”
Of course, sticking to the rules for extended periods at home can be hard.
Isaac*, 25, from the North West, suspected he had coronavirus when he lost his sense of taste and smell around the time lockdown was imposed. Although this wasn’t yet officially
recognised as a symptom ptom of Covid-19, he had read d enough to know that many sufferers erers had reported the same experience. xperience.
“At first, my partner er was quite cautious and we kept t our distance in the house,” e,” he says. “He slept in a different bedroom and was quite careful l about cleaning anything I had touched. We would watch television in the same room but as s far apart as possible, on separate sofas. Because use we couldn’t hug properly, we did air hugs.”
Isaac’s symptoms continued for three weeks, but as time wore ore on, the pair began to let down their guard.
“We got a bit bored d and a bit lax,” Isaac admits. . “Even though there was no reason to think the threat had ad gone away, human nature kicked in.” Interestingly, Isaac’s partner never developed symptoms, though the couple don’t know if he had the disease asymptomatically. Scientific estimates of how easy it is to contract the virus from someone in your household vary. In mid-april, researchers in China found the rate of infection among household members was just 16.3 per cent, with adults facing a greater likelihood of infection than children.
In June, a study by researchers based in China and the US put the likelihood of infection within a household slightly higher, at 17.1 per cent. But findings published this week from an Indian study of 80,000 primary coronavirus cases and 575,000 people with whom they had come into contact, were notably different: the chance of contracting coronavirus from someone you lived with was only about one in 10, this latest research concluded. It also found, perhaps startlingly, that 71 per cent of the primary cases didn’t pass on the virus.
“It seems to indicate a lot of people with Covid don’t really infect anyone else,” Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy in Delhi told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 yester yesterday. “[There were] also differences in people, p in terms of how much they shed the virus.” In Sarah’s ca case, despite her best efforts to avoi avoid spreading Covid-19 to h her family, they caught it any anyway. “On day six, before I cam came out of my bedroom isolation, my daughte daughter started coughing,” she say says. “Then my son and hu husband got symp symptoms, too.”
Bu But it wasn’t all bad new news. Sarah’s family had less severe cases, all m made a good rec recovery, and she later test tested positive for Cov Covid antibodies.
F For once, “it was qui quite nice not to have to ju juggle parenting and illne illness – and just lie in bed and fully rest when I wa was feeling pretty roug rough”, she says. “I would wouldn’t normally be allowed to just sleep and be wait waited on so much by my husb husband. I’d have to crack on and do some childcar childcare!” h
‘For once, it was nice not to have to juggle parenting and illness, to just lie in bed and rest’