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Wingate: Front-line workers “will get us through this.”
Brian Wingate has blood in the game in the Covid-19 pandemic — and he wants to share it to help others survive.
He wants to donate blood so the plasma can help coronavirus patients survive the illness he just survived.
Wingate, a fifth-term Beaver Hills alder, has emerged from a 14-day quarantine after testing positive on March 22 for Covid-19.
The result didn’t surprise him. He was already quite sick.
Fortunately, he never had to go to the hospital. Instead, he suffered at home.
“I got it real bad,” Wingate said Wednesday in an interview. “I felt like I was underwater. I had the chills. I had a headache. My eyes were hurting. I had the runs. I had it in my thighs. You feel like someone stabbing you.” His temperature hit 102. He lost all sense of taste and smell.
Wingate doesn’t know how he contracted the disease.
“I’m always busy. I’m always around people,” he noted. He and other alders attended a National League of Cities meeting in Washington from March 8 – 11, for instance. “I was on the train. I rode down on the train. Came back off the train.”
The night he completed quarantine, he headed to Walgreens to buy disinfectant spray and wipes. He drove around the neighborhood, with his mask on, rolling down the window to check up on people. He’s communicating with seniors in his ward about the need to keep a safe distance from people.
He’s on a mission to keep people safe from the deadly virus, which is taking an especially large toll on the black community.
“I was blessed to go through this process and come out the other side. If I can help some people get better, I want to do that,” Wingate said.
Along those lines, Wingate said he wants to donate blood to be used to help patients fight off the disease. He notified the state of his interest in making a donation. “I’m waiting for them to call me back.” Doctors are using plasma taken from the convalescent plasma from the blood of recovered Covid-19 patients to help newer patients.
Meanwhile, Wingate is urging people both to protect themselves through social distancing — and to reach out to friends and loved ones.
“This is the time to call people. This is the time to Face Time people. That’s why we made these smart phones. This is the time to drop food on the front porch and show you love them and keep moving them.”
Wingate, who serves as vice-president of the Yale’s blue-collar union Local 35, singled out the nurses, custodians, pharmacy workers, and other pepole who still need to show up for their jobs during the pandemic.
“It’s the front-line workers,” he said, “who will get us through this.”