A 19-year-old Nampa woman with ties to Pocatello who recently contracted COVID-19 has been sick for almost a month and is worried the virus might leave her with long-standing health issues.
Rose Dunton, who recently moved back to Nampa to attend Northwest Nazarene University after having lived in Pocatello for the past five years, went from being able to walk at least 4 miles every day to feeling as if she’d pass out after standing for just a few minutes.
She says living with a COVID-19 diagnosis over the past few weeks, despite testing negative for the virus, has taken both an emotional and physical toll on her overall health and well-being.
“This has definitely been a very scary experience,” Dunton said. “Beyond physical, this has taken an emotional toll on me. I am younger, physically active, healthy and I take care of my immune system. And yet this still took so much out of me. I was in the emergency room multiple times, and weeks later I am still so far from where I was before catching the coronavirus. It’s definitely scary to imagine how awful this would be for someone with preexisting conditions considering how bad it was for me.”
Symptomatically, Dunton first experienced what she described as a “strange red blotchy rash” around her eyes on July 10. Over the next few days, Dunton began to feel slightly fatigued with a scratchy throat and body aches that gradually worsened. Her 10-year-old brother on July 12 also started showing symptoms of COVID-19, including a high-grade fever and a sore throat.
On July 14, Dunton was experiencing all the aforementioned symptoms and also started feeling significant tightness in her chest accompanied with a fever higher than 100 degrees and difficulty breathing.
“That is when I went to Saltzer Health Hospital and got tested,” Dunton said. “Four days later on July 18, I received my test results and it came back negative.”
Despite the negative COVID-19 test results, Dunton’s condition continued to worsen during the four days in which she awaited the results, so much so that she decided to visit the emergency room at St. Luke’s Nampa Medical Center that same day. Both her oxygen and blood pressure stats were in the tank.
“My oxygen would be fine if I was lying down, but when I would stand up to walk it would drop to around 85 to 88,” Dunton said. “My blood pressure was 83 over 55 before I went in. We decided to go in because my chest was feeling tight and heavy, I was lightheaded even when sitting down, and my fingernails and lips appeared blue. It was difficult to walk only a couple steps without feeling dizzy and lightheaded. They did some more diagnostics and confirmed that I was positive for COVID-19 at that time.”
Due to a shortage of COVID-19 nasal swabs, Dunton said she was never tested a second time for the coronavirus, but her positive diagnosis was confirmed via her white blood cell count, oxygen and blood pressure levels and overall symptoms, she said.
“They explained that the test is only about 75 percent accurate,” Dunton said. “But with all my symptoms and my public-facing job as a barista they were sure I had a significant upper-respiratory infection identical to that of COVID-19.
In spite of the negative test results, health officials declared Dunton as a confirmed COVID-19 patient and St. Luke's provided her with a discharge document that indicated she was diagnosed by a health care professional as having COVID-19.
In a recent study, Johns Hopkins University researchers found that testing people for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — too early in the course of infection is likely to result in a false negative test, even though they may eventually test positive for the virus.
A report on the findings was published in the May 13 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.
“A negative test, whether or not a person has symptoms, doesn’t guarantee that they aren’t infected by the virus,” says Lauren Kucirka, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., obstetrics and gynecology resident at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “How we respond to, and interpret, a negative test is very important because we place others at risk when we assume the test is perfect. However, those infected with the virus are still able to potentially spread the virus.”
Over the next 10 days, Dunton would visit the emergency room at St. Luke’s in Nampa and Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise four times, during which she received at least five bags of IV fluids and was tested emotionally, knowing there was no cure for what she was enduring. She was never hospitalized overnight, but her family was prohibited from visiting her during the several hours each hospital stay lasted.
“There is nothing they can do to make you 100 percent better because there is no cure for the coronavirus,” Dunton said. “All they could do was treat the symptoms.”
Health department officials completed a contact tracing for Dunton and her family and determined her case was the result of community transmission, meaning there was no clear source of origin of her infection. As a barista in Nampa, Dunton said she has been wearing a cloth face-covering since February and that her family had been actively monitoring the virus pandemic since the first outbreaks in Wuhan, China, occurred at the start of 2020.
“Even though you wear a mask, the fabric ones only prevent you from spreading it to other people but not from you getting it,” said Dunton, adding that none of her coworkers tested positive. “I did the best that I could to prevent it.”
Nearly one month after she first started experiencing symptoms, Dunton says she still has a low-grade fever around 99 degrees and daily fatigue.
“My blood pressure is still pretty low and my fatigue hits every day around 4 p.m.,” Dunton said. “I can go to sleep right then and sleep through the rest of the night. I would say about 10 days ago is when the worst of my symptoms started to subside.”
Dunton hopes to return to work during the next two weeks, though that’s completely dependent upon when she feels well enough to make it through a full day’s work, she said.
“I don’t have an exact date to return back to work but my personal goal is to get back in the next two weeks,” Dunton said. “I can’t go to work with a fever and I have to be able to stand up for six to eight hours, considerably longer than the 15 minutes I can stand right now until I feel as if I am going to pass out, which is far more improved than what I felt like on July 18.”
Dunton said she is quite concerned about how COVID-19 will affect her overall health in the future knowing that some patients have experienced long-standing neurological and cardiovascular side effects from the virus.
“This was definitely eye-opening,” Dunton said. “I do have worries about any underlying issues in the future. We have taken many X-rays to ensure my heart is not inflamed or that my condition is such that I am at risk of experiencing the mini-strokes that’s happening with some young people.”
Dunton continued, “Though the worst, scary parts of it have subsided there is still that lasting fatigue and blood pressure issue and that has me worried. What I do know is this has been miserable and I want to do all that I can to prevent anyone else from getting it.”