USA TODAY International Edition
NJ residents camp out all night for an 8 a. m. test
At 5 a. m., 101 cars sat in a row that was half a mile
PARAMUS, N. J. – The night was cold and silent, and John Dougherty wasn’t taking any more chances. He drove slowly. When he arrived at the test site, he pulled his white Honda minivan onto the shoulder of the three- lane suburban highway. He spun the key to kill the engine. It was 2: 55 a. m.
Testing wouldn’t begin for another five hours. Dougherty would wait. Almost two weeks ago, his wife got sick. They worried she had coronavirus, but the first test came back negative. They thought: Maybe it was just the flu. Dougherty kept scrubbing the house with disinfectant wipes. He still wore a mask, but sometimes it hung loose around his neck.
“I let my guard down,” said Dougherty, 64. “I had to take care of her.”
Dougherty’s wife has been in the hospital five days now. She is alive because a machine is forcing oxygen into her lungs. She is alone, and no one may visit.
Now Dougherty feels like he’s caught the flu. The fever, the aches. Under federal rules, these symptoms qualify him to get him tested for coronavirus. His daughter Lauren, 19, has a cough. Sitting in his car, Dougherty worried. What if a cough isn’t enough? What if living with two parents, both of whom appear to have the virus, is not enough? According to rules set up for the testing site, Lauren Dougherty would not be tested for coronavirus until she, too, develops a fever and chest pains. Still, John Dougherty wanted to try to get her a test.
So on Tuesday, in the middle of the night, he arrived at Bergen Community College. Lauren, wearing pajamas, rode in the back seat, as far away from her father as she possibly could sit. Dougherty’s plan: Beg the doctors to make an exception, and test them both.
“I can’t leave her home,” Dougherty said. “My daughter has a cough. That’s worrisome. We’ve been together since this started.”
As Dougherty talked, his blue mask moved around his face. After each sentence, he paused to press his thumbs against the mask, molding the fabric tightly to the curve of his nose.
For an hour, the line grew by ones and twos. By 4 a. m., another car seemed to join the line every minute. At 5 a. m., 101 cars sat in a row that stretched half a mile south.
“I’ve been here every morning since Friday, starting at 6,” said Safran Ishmael, 27, who drove 25 miles from her home to arrive at the college at 2: 30 a. m. Tuesday. “I was coughing really bad, and I had a fever of 101. But by the time I got here, the line was wrapped all the way around the block.”
Nancy Nunez works at a grocery store in Bergen County. She loves her customers, she said, but she thinks they’ve made her sick. She arrived in line in her battered Honda minivan at 4 a. m. and took her temperature — she had a fever of 100.5 degrees. Then she looked around.
“This line is crazy!” said Nunez, of Paterson. “It looks like something out of a movie.”
Nunez and her family have improvised. She spent seven days locked in her bedroom. When she gets hungry, she knocks on the door. Family members bring her a plate of food, leaving it on the floor. Nunez opens the door a crack, takes the plate, and cleans the floor where it sat with a Clorox wipe.
Every 30 seconds, Nunez fell into a coughing fit. She worries her coughs will spread the virus to her son, two daughters and grandson, all of whom live with her.
“It’s scary!” Nunez said. “My mom is 70. I told her not to come over to my house, no matter what.”
When John Dougherty finally arrived at the front of the line, he wasn’t required to beg. He’s ill, he explained. His wife of 36 years is living on a ventilator, and his daughter has a cough. Would the doctors please test her?
Lauren Dougherty won the lottery. She got tested.