Waging battles that won’t end
recovered. Being a survivor of the coronavirus doesn’t mean you’ve
In the months since the virus first crept into the Bay Area, more than 500 people have died and more than 17,500 others have positively tested for the virus. For the rest, the prospect of getting sick looms large.
Now, after 100 days in — as most counties in the Bay Area have begun to open up — it can feel like the air is looser, that the worst part is over. But those who dealt with the virus say they haven’t necessarily defeated it, and their lives will never be the same.
The Chronicle interviewed eight coronavirus survivors who had a variety of experiences.
John Marble still has his COVID19 goodbye letter, and it is something to behold.
In it, he explains why his San Francisco apartment was a mess (“I’ve just been deep Spring cleaning”), offers his last words (“What a life!”) and crafted the whole thing in a blue highlighter.
“I didn’t have the energy to walk 4 feet across the room to grab a pen,” Marble says.
Marble, a writer and speaker on autism and neurodiversity and founder of Pivot Diversity, avoided overnight hospitalization for the disease. But even with his relatively moderate case, the 43yearold Mission District resident says it was the worst health experience of his life.
“It’s going to be harder to take this disease seriously as it goes on, because it’s just human nature to be worn down by all the information and all the practices,” Marble says. “And it’s something we still have to be vigilant of, because I don’t want other people to go through this experience.”
Marble in 2009 was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, becoming Obama’s first openly autistic staff member. He was in New York City in midMarch, scheduled to speak at a conference that was canceled. Marble started losing his sense of taste and smell in New York on Thursday,
March 12, returned to San Francisco the following day and touched ground with strong flulike symptoms. The symptoms lingered, and by the end of the month, the fever began to spike into dangerous territory.
“April first was probably my biggest low point,” Marble said. “My breathing was just heavily labored. It felt like I was manually having to make myself breathe, and I was concerned about passing away in the middle of the night.”
In retrospect, he probably should have called for an ambulance. Instead, he wrote his letter.
“I was furiously texting people, just appreciations of them, unspooling these love letters, things I want to say in case this goes south — because it very much felt that way,” Marble said.
Marble spent most of April 2 in the emergency room. He returned a week later after experiencing chest pains related to pneumonia. Now entering his fourth month since he started showing symptoms of COVID19, the onceactive advocate only recently started rebuilding his strength.
“This is a hard thing to get through, even if you’re considered mild or moderate,” Marble says. “I don’t think my case would be considered severe, but this is probably the most severe health experience that I’ve gone through.”