Nearly 86,000 South Dakotans have tested positive for COVID-19. Now that they’ve contracted the virus, are they safe to visit grandparents or return to other pre-pandemic activities without fear of contracting the virus again or giving it to others?
When Julia talks about her 85-year-old mom, her voice is full of love and admiration.
“She’s a funny little lady. She’s got a great sense of humor. She’s extremely intelligent. She’s got a lot of that wisdom that you don’t just get, but you acquire. After 85 years of life and raising 10 kids. She is extremely patient and is so forgiving. She is kind and likes to have fun and she loves life. But it’s challenging when you spend that much time alone. She misses my dad like crazy. They were married for 59 years and she was used to have a house full of kids, then they all grow up and move out and then she’s there completely by herself a large part of the time. And that breaks my heart. So, this COVID thing has made it even worse,” Julia says.
To protect her mom from being exposed during the pandemic, Julia and her siblings limited their contact. And when they do visit, they wear masks, maintain 6-feet distance, and try to stay outdoors. But then Julia and her husband contracted COVID-19 two weeks before Thanksgiving.
Julia had a low-grade fever, nasal congestion, fatigue and lost her ability to taste or smell. By the week before Thanksgiving most her symptoms were gone, her quarantine was over and she was back to work. So, Julia and a few of her brothers and sisters who had also recovered from the virus, decided to spend Thanksgiving weekend with their mom.
The next week, Julia invited her mom to Sioux Falls to spend some time with her.
“If there is a silver lining, if you can call it that, it’s that we don’t have to worry about giving it to her, hopefully, but we’re still gonna take some precautions. We’re not gonna, you know, hugging and embraced and kiss like we would, we’re gonna wear a mask. We’re probably gonna try and stay 6-feet apart at all times,” Julia says.
Julia’s actions align with CDC recommendations, says Dr. David Basel, Vice President of Clinical Quality, Avera Medical Group.
“The CDC has pretty good evidence that 10 days out from your COVID diagnosis, your onset of true symptoms that you’re kind of – or if you’re asymptomatic and you turn positive, 10 days from your positive test, there’s pretty good evidence its generally thought that you are no longer contagious and you don’t have to get tested to be cleared,” Basel says.
In fact, Dr. Basel says even if a second test comes back with a positive result, 10 days after the first positive, folks are not contagious. There is one caveat.
“The CDC guidelines say that you need to be fever free without Tylenol or Ibuprofen or anything for 24 hours and symptoms are improving, because we do find they may not be totally gone – especially that sense of taste and smell, because that can be gone for weeks after you recover. So, what happens is when you’ve had COVID you develop a certain amount of immunity and you’re relatively pretty well protected for we think at least 90-days,” Basel says.
Even though over time that immunity may decrease, if a person who has had COVID contracts it again, Dr. Basel says their symptoms should be much more mild. And there’s more good news.
“Your chances of spreading it to others is definitely greatly reduced than if you’ve never seen it before, but it’s not zero so we still recommend that you use good social distancing and masking,” Basel says.
This is all good news for Kelcy Schaunaman. A 2020 law school graduate, Kelcy recently caught COVID from her mom who came into contact with the virus at work. Kelcy says she was being careful because even though she is young and at low risk, she does spend a lot of time with her parents.
“My mom and I were being really careful because my dad’s the one that’s high risk, because he has heart disease and diabetes. So, we were mostly worried about him and then he ended up with antibodies and so luckily, it turned out fine,” Schaunaman says.
Even though her fears of COVID have subsided a bit, she says she is still cautious and wears her mask in public.
“I still kind of have anxiety about what the future holds. You know, what affects it will have months or years down the road that nobody knew about,” Schaunaman says.
Because immunity is thought to wear off over time, Dr. Basel encourages folks who have had COVID-19 to get the vaccine once it is available.
-Contact SDPB’s Lura Roti by email.