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Valerie Horsley: This should be easier.
Two prominent Hamden public figures are in quarantine in their homes because they, or a member of their family, has some of the symptoms of COVID-19, but can’t get tested.
It shouldn’t be so hard to get tested, they said, but they’re coping with the uncertainty.
Last Tuesday, Hamden Legislative Councilwoman Valerie Horsley started to feeling a little achy. Soon, she had a mild fever with a temperature around 99 or 100 degrees. Then her chest became a little bit congested, and she developed a mild cough.
She hadn’t been around anyone who had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, she said, but still, she wondered if she had somehow caught it. “At the time I was getting sick, we knew that there was this epicenter 50 miles away on a commuter line,” she said, referring to an outbreak in New Rochelle, New York.
Horsley is an associate professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale. To get more information, she did what any academic would do: She read a scientific paper.
The paper, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, described the symptoms of two mild cases of the virus on a cruise ship in Japan. “I was like: ‘This sounds exactly like what I have,’” Horsley recalled.
She called Yale Health first, but didn’t actually get through to anyone until Friday. She said they told her it sounded like she was sick, but that it didn’t sound like she had the novel coronavirus. Then she called Yale New Haven Hospital’s coronavirus hotline because she began to feel short of breath when she was walking around. “They said I was too low-risk to get tested.”
At the time, testing was very limited. There is now more testing available, but nowhere near as much as in other countries like South Korea.
Horsley said she routinely does the type of test she’s currently unable to get in her lab. Polyamerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, like the coronavirus test, identify a certain sequence of viral RNA in a patient’s saliva. Horsley said it’s more complicated in a clinical setting than it is in a lab like hers, but it should still be much easier to get a COVID-19 test than it currently is in the United States.
“It’s really frustrating. I was surprised that they were not more prepared,” she said of the country’s testing infrastructure.
COVID-19 testing has been fraught with delays in the US. After the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) developed its own test, it appeared to be giving false positive results, and the agency had to redesign it. Since the nation is in a state of emergency, any new tests developed by other institutions had to go through a strict approval process by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) until the agency loosened its rules on Feb. 29 to speed up testing.
On Tuesday, Horsley said she was still feeling sick, but was a little bit better. She has quarantined herself at home and has told anyone she came in contact with just before she fell ill to look out for symptoms. But without the ability to get tested, she doesn’t know whether or not she might have helped spread the virus.
“I just think we don’t have any idea how widespread this is,” she said.
“Outbreak.” “Contagion.” “Love In The Time Of Cholera.”
Sean Grace
On Thursday, Sean Grace’s son Connor woke up with a fever. Grace called his son’s school to call him out sick.
The school nurse called Grace back to tell him that “not only for now should [Connor] not return to school. You should keep his sisters out too.” A few hours later, the district announced that it was canceling school as a preventative measure against the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Grace said his son has a lowered immune response because of treatment he gets for another condition, and recently had a bad bout of pneumonia. This new illness could be coronavirus, or it could be something else, he said, but in either case, he did not want to take any chances. He took him to the doctor that day.
Connor’s doctor said he could not be tested because he was not experiencing breathing distress and because he’s not in a category that’s considered high risk, even though he has a compromised immune system.
Grace, who last week was elected chair of the Hamden Democratic Town Committee, said he understood that it was not the doctor’s fault. “But the main thing is we should have a lot more tests available, and I don’t think that’s the fault of the state or local or even national healthcare providers,” he said.
Connor has since developed the beginnings of pneumonia, but luckily the doctors caught it early. Grace said they think it might be bacterial rather than viral, and prescribed antibiotics.
Since Thursday, the whole family, including Grace’s mother in law who is visiting from Jamaica, are quarantined in the house. How are they passing the time? Grace chuckled at the question. “A lot of Netflix.” Thematic Netflix, that is.
On Thursday, they started with “Outbreak.” They took a break from the pandemic theme to watch “Friday The 13th” on Friday, but returned quickly thereafter. On Monday, they finished the miniseries “The Stand,” which is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name about a weaponized form of influenza.
“We have ‘Contagion’ in the hopper,” Grace said. And now that his wife is back from a trip to see an ailing relative, they can also turn to a classic: “Love in the Time of Cholera” — the movie, not the book.
If the Netflix binge gets old, Grace said, the family might take advantage of the weather to make a real vegetable garden, chicken wire and all.