of Cai’s friends who were fellow Chinese immigrants were also stocking up. Like Cai, their family connections and exposure to Chinese media drove home how dangerous the disease was and how quickly it spread. If the virus became prevalent in New York, Cai knew what his family would do: They would lock down for two full months. No one would have to leave the house for anything.
The medical offices where Cai worked had put up a sign directing patients with a cough or fever to wear a mask, and to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had traveled recently to China. Cai never failed to wear a mask and gloves at the office. And yet he still did not see the virus as an imminent threat: He made plans to attend a medical conference and took the subway around the city to his various offices without wearing any protection. He and some of his Chinese-American friends, most of them first-generation, wore masks in public starting in January, reminded that it was a common-sense precaution by the devastating news from Wuhan. But then, in early February, a video ran on the local news showing a man violently attacking an Asian woman who was wearing a mask near a subway turnstile in downtown Manhattan. Cai — and many of his friends — stopped wearing them.
Now he felt he had let down his guard, and the worst had happened: He had tested positive. He felt real terror, as did the rest of his family. His father, who lives in Shanghai, reached out through various connections to doctors who had managed the illness there. His wife’s family was doing the same. Huang also was getting in touch with everyone he knew who he thought might be able to help. “I called up all my pulmonary friends, I.C.U. friends,
infectious-disease friends — people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years,” Huang says. He spoke to Chinese doctors from Shanghai who had been deployed to Wuhan, all of whom painted a dire picture of the damage the virus could do. He came to understand that many people recovered quickly on their own, even after a long illness; but he also knew that the disease could go from progressing slowly, seemingly harmlessly, to moving unfathomably quickly, even in otherwise-healthy people. The antibiotics Cai was given might help with a secondary infection, but they could not fight the virus. And there was no way to know what course Cai’s case would take.
Cai was anxious, and it seemed to him that the doctors were trying to keep him calm. They assured him that he was a young, healthy man. He remembers many telling him this would feel like a bad flu. But by March 6, his fifth day at the hospital, this no longer felt to Cai like any other flu. By then, he’d been moved to the third floor, into a negative-pressure isolation room — a room whose atmospheric pressure was so low, air outside flowed in, theoretically preventing any potentially contaminated air from flowing out. He had a pulse oximeter on his finger and could keep an eye on his own oxygen levels. He could see that they were unstable, sometimes dropping momentarily to a unnervingly low level of saturation — 85 percent — before shooting right back up. In a healthy individual, saturation levels typically remain above 95 percent. “I have difficulty breathing now, too much phlegm,” he wrote to Huang. Especially when he lay flat, his oxygen levels fell. “I need to get up and take a deep breath.” He felt as if he had been swimming under water, then
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