What Is It Like to Get COVID-19 Without Underlying Conditions? It’s Awful.

“I struggled to walk from my bathroom to my kitchen, and that is probably 15 feet,” says Marchelle Watson.

CHECKING IN: A drive-thru COVID-19 testing center is set up in a Northeast Portland parking lot along Interstate 84. (Henry Cromett)
By Anthony Effinger

WW presents "Distant Voices," a daily video interview for the era of social distancing. Our reporters are asking Portlanders what they're doing during quarantine.

When Portlander Marchelle Watson got COVID-19, she didn't binge Netflix because she couldn't breathe well enough to get out of bed and walk to the couch.

"I struggled to walk from my bathroom to my kitchen, and that is probably 15 feet," she says. "I felt like I needed to take a break. I couldn't go any farther."

Instead, she read Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez. Her experience was more Love in the Time of Coronavirus.

If you're tempted to go out to a #ReopenAmerica protest, listen to this interview with Watson first. She spent two weeks in COVID hell, alternating between freezing chills and roasting fever, and it took her a month to get back to normal. (She never received an official diagnosis, because Oregon doesn't have enough tests—she's one of the "presumed positives" you hear about.)

She had no underlying medical conditions, either. Quite the opposite, she was the picture of health before COVID struck. Only now is she back to normal.

Related: "I thought: Shit. I have it."

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