What it’s really like to have Covid-19: Two Aussies share their experience

There have been so many coronavirus headlines, yet few Australians have spoken about their own experience with the virus, so Starts at 60 talked to two people who can share with you what it’s like to battle Covid-19. And we explain how Australia’s testing procedures work, because a positive test is no reason to panic, as our story below shows.

Mario’s story:

“We’d been in Italy visiting family – myself, my two sisters Anna and Sofia and my brother Stefano* – and left Rome on the March 9. We were all temperature-checked individually before boarding our flight and we passed that no problems. On the flight from Rome to Dubai, there was myself, Anna and Sofia sitting together and Stefano was nowhere near us, he was at the back of the plane.

We arrived in Dubai on March 10, where they had temperature scanners, which me and my sisters walked through, and we were fine, so we waited for Stefano, who was far behind us because he was one of the last ones off the plane. But the scanners picked up that he had a temperature and they took him straight away – we were waiting on the other side of the scanners and didn’t know what happened.

I ended up getting hold of him on his mobile just before we boarded the flight back to Brisbane and he told me that because he had a slight temperature, he’d been put in an ambulance and was on the way to a hospital in Dubai to be tested for coronavirus.

When we arrived back in Brisbane on the evening of March 10, we went through Customs and Queensland Health representatives there told us they knew that Stefano had been held in Dubai. Because we’d been in Italy in the past 10 days, we got temperature-checked in Brisbane – they were only testing people who’d been in Italy or another high-risk country. We were all fine but Sofia was told to go into self-isolation because she works in the healthcare industry. Anna and I were told we could go home. They suggested we self-isolate if we could but if not, it was fine to go to work.

But we’d seen in Italy that they were shutting down whole cities so we’d already planned to self-isolate, just because we could see how serious the situation was over there. So we went to an apartment, the two of us, and told everyone to stay away.

When we woke up the next day, we heard from Stefano that he’d tested positive for coronavirus. It wasn’t until March 12 that Anna and I started getting symptoms but not like what we’d been told at Brisbane airport to expect if we had the virus, which was a fever, cough or sore throat. We had aching bones – a bit like you do with the flu – and headaches. But because I really hadn’t had many symptoms, I wasn’t scared at all.

So, we didn’t know what to do, it could’ve just been jet-lag. But we stayed isolated and my partner Amelia and Anna’s son were dropping off groceries outside the door then ringing the doorbell to let us know to collect them.

Then on March 13, Sofia, who wasn’t with us, she’d gone to her own house, started getting the same symptoms, so she rang her local GP but they said not to come to their surgery because it didn’t sound like coronavirus. By the following Monday, me and Anna felt a bit achy but fine. Then on March 17 I got a slight fever, nothing over 38 degrees – we were checking four times a day! – so I rang the GP’s surgery and they told me to see how I felt the next day and to call them if it was worse.

The fever was gone by March 18 but I still felt tired so I called the doctor just in case and told them that I had been in contact with my brother, who had been diagnosed with coronavirus, so they said ‘come straight in. They said “just wear a mask and wash your hands, you’ll be right”, so that’s what I did. I was tested on March 18 and on March 19 they rang up and said I’d tested positive for coronavirus.

After that, I must’ve had eight or nine calls over the next two days from Queensland Health – most of the time they didn’t know someone else had called me and I had to go through the story so many times – and in the end it was agreed that I had to wait seven days, so a week after my last test, then be tested again. And I needed to have two negative tests before I could come out of isolation.

I didn’t understand why it had to be a whole week between tests and the people from Queensland Health said there was no reason for it, just our protocol says we won’t give you another test in less than a week. I got a call every day, though, from Queensland Health to see how I was feeling. Then on Monday, March 23, two days before my next test was due, I got a call and the doctor said if my symptoms started March 12, I could’ve left isolation on March 22!

I said “I thought I was getting tested again on Wednesday and I needed two negative tests before I could stop self-isolation” and he said “no, that was the old rule, it all changed on the weekend”. The new rule was that you needed to do 10 days of isolation from the moment you get your first symptoms, then do two days of being clear of symptoms while still in isolation, then you’re free to go. The doctor actually discharged me on the phone that day.

The trouble is, none of my family want to be near me because they think I’ve still got it – my partner’s parents are vulnerable so she doesn’t want to pass it on to them – but the doctors won’t test me again because they said they’re saving their tests for medical professionals and new cases. So I asked another GP and he said that the experts have now learned that you’ll keep having positive test results, even if you’re not contagious any more.

The scary thing is – and we’re not having a go at Queensland Health because the situation was very confusing at the time – but we knew what was happening in Italy so we self-isolated. If we’d followed what we were told to do at Brisbane Airport, we’d have gone out to work and possibly infected dozens of people, not to mention our family members.

Stefano, on the other hand, was retested on March 16 in Dubai — about a week after his first test — and it was positive as expected. He was then tested on March 23 and the results came back positive again. He finally tested negative on March 30 and was then tested again 48 hours later.

Stefano tested negative on the last test and was given the all-clear to return home. Then things got a bit tricky!

Over the last few days his wife Alexandra has been trying to organise a flight home. The last I heard he is flying from Dubai to London, and then catching a chartered flight to Melbourne, where he will have to self-isolate for two weeks before flying back home to Brisbane.

Anna’s story:

“We were having dinner at a restaurant with all our relatives near Florence when they received texts from the Italian government that the north of Italy was shutting down. So we had two hours to race home, throw everything in our suitcases and flee to Rome. Having to leave my Italian sister behind was awful and devastating.

It was crazy. We’d pre-booked Singapore Airlines flights for a later date and we couldn’t change them, so we had to fork out an extra $1,500 for an Emirates flight home. Looking back, though, we were the lucky ones.

When I got back home, I had extremely mild symptoms – just like mild aching bones, sometimes not even that, just that feeling where you don’t feel 100 percent – and a heaviness in the head rather than a headache, a bit of constipation and swollen feet, probably from the flight. So I just took Panadol on and off for the first week because I really didn’t feel that bad.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t bored. I would sit and watch the ocean from the balcony, catch up on some reading, meditate or watch Netflix.

By the second week I stopped taking Panadol and the headache was just mild. But then Mario got his positive test result and on March 20, the day after him, Sofia called to say she’d tested positive too.

What that meant was that I was put on a Queensland Health register as someone who’d had contact with Mario, so they were telling me to leave him and self-isolate, and I kept trying to explain that no, we’d all had contact with Stefano originally, and that I’d already had the same symptoms as Mario but they insisted that that was the protocol that I had to isolate from him.

Finally, I managed to get Queensland Health to understand what I was saying about who I’d been in contact with and that I’d already been sick – just not with the type of symptoms they were looking for, definitely no fever – and was getting better, so they said I needed to get tested.

They sent a Volunteer Australia volunteer to pick me up to take me to the hospital and
she was in the full plastic suit, mask and everything!

I got a positive test result the next day, and I could see that they were now understanding that people can have coronavirus and have no symptoms or really mild symptoms. Since then, I’ve been getting calls from three different hospitals every day, which is a great response because they’re clearly really onto it, but they’re not really linked up with each other so I’m saying the same thing to them all. But that’s probably because it’s brand new and they’ve never done this kind of health monitoring before.

I wasn’t surprised because my siblings all tested positive. I was probably more worried about what if I hadn’t chosen to self-isolate? I could’ve infected so many people! But I was also relieved that my immune system was healthy.

The trouble is, even though I’ve finished the isolation period and the doctors say I’m good to go, my employer wants to see a negative test result. So now I’m waiting for a medical certificate that I can give my boss, because the doctors say they’re not going to keep doing tests until people are negative – once you’ve done your 10 days and have no symptoms for two days, you’re free to go, even if you’re still testing positive.

So there’s still a lot of misunderstanding from employers on what the situation is. The good thing is that the doctors say I can’t get this strain of coronavirus again because I’m now immune to it. If the virus mutates, though, I could get it again.

When we were in Italy, the social distancing rule had just been introduced and shops and bars were only letting in limited numbers of people, so we’d already got used to how different life was before returning to Australia. What’s really heartbreaking is hearing from my niece Chiara, who’s working in the hospitals there and seeing the devastation that’s been inflicted there every day.

*Names changed to protect anonymity