If Tom Chiarella looks out the second story window of his Airbnb rental apartment, he can see the town square in Greencastle, Indiana.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would probably be a nice place to visit. The apartment is in an 18th century Victorian mercantile building located about 20 minutes south of Chiarella's home.
But these are extraordinary times. The loft has been a hideout of sorts, not a vacation rental, for the Rochester native and freelance journalist.
On March 13, three days after returning from the National Quarantine Center in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was on assignment for Esquire.com, Chiarella started feeling sick.
"I thought I was tired and I had a fever that night. That was Friday, the 13th," he recalled.
"On Saturday morning, I had a laundry list of symptoms, including a breathing problem, including runny nose, watery eyes, kind of normal flu-like symptoms....a cough, a dry cough. My cough was hard enough that it made me uncomfortable, but it wasn't brutal."
He knew what that might mean. He had just interviewed epidemiologists at the federal quarantine center about the novel coronavirus pandemic. Chiarella doesn't believe he caught the virus there. If anything, he said his conversations with the scientists who work at the center made him realize he needed to self-quarantine.
"I came out of it feeling like I understood the case for social distancing and for isolation if you're symptomatic," he said.
So Chiarella checked into the apartment that has become his temporary home for 24 days and counting. One of his most memorable symptoms came during the middle of the night, two nights in a row.
"I would hear this 'pop, pop, pop' and I thought, 'who's knocking on my door at 2:30 in the morning?' " he said, "and I would get up and walk to the door and no one was there. The second night I did that, I got up twice. The third time I got up, I could hear myself take a deep breath and I could hear the sound, 'pop, pop, pop,' and I thought, 'Wow, I'm actually making the sound of death at my door.' "
The knocking sound was coming from his own chest. That was especially concerning, because Chiarella has atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can interrupt the normal flow of blood.
He was tested for COVID-19 the following Tuesday. It took 14 business days before he received the results. "That was a long wait," he said.
The results were negative, but Chiarella's doctor told him to presume he has the disease, like an untold number of patients who are believed to have received false-negative results. He expects a follow-up test to confirm it.
Meanwhile, he can't go home until he is symptom free for three days. While there are hours where Chiarella feels less ill, he said he feels as sick now as he did a week ago. A fever comes every day at 4 o'clock.
"It's like an appointment," he said.
The experts Chiarella talked to both as a journalist, and now as a patient, told him it would take an infected person's body about 38 days to shed the novel coronavirus.
"Which I find a little dispiriting," he sighed, "the idea that I might be here for 38 days."
It's exhausting he said, to feel an ease of symptoms, only to have them return every day. He keeps in close contact with his doctor and his wife, who calls frequently to make sure he doesn't need to be hospitalized.
"I vowed to stop pretending I'm an expert on everything because I read the New York Times or I have a Facebook account, and I try to listen to her as my observer and partner, but also to my doctors and to the experts," he said. "I have to admit that I've heard the stories by visiting the biocontainment unit, by talking to epidemiologists, of what the breathing looks like in the acceleration stage when things really start to move forward. I have a kind of check list, and outside of my own breathing, which happened, I never felt like I hit the points on that checklist."
So, he watches and waits until it's safe to leave isolation. Family and friends drop off food, notes, novels, and candles. The people delivering takeout food offer to pick up things from the drug store. Friends honk their car horns when the drive by.
Maybe these human connections are part of the reason Chiarella said he feels optimistic.
"Millions of us, it that's what it comes to, will survive," he said, "and we'll all have our stories."
