by Nick Dill, Student Reporter
The coronavirus pandemic has affected Northwestern students and community members in Alva.
As of press time Wednesday, Woods County had a total of 24 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, data from the Oklahoma State Health Department shows. Twenty-two of the county’s COVID-19 patients have recovered from the virus, leaving two active cases.
The City of Alva has 18 confirmed cases of the virus, though none of them are active, the department reported. No one in the county has died of COVID-19.
Savannah Francis, a sophomore political science major at Northwestern, tested positive in her hometown of Tahlequah in late July and experienced what it felt like to have the coronavirus.
Francis said she felt bad the whole time before and after she tested positive.
“I just stayed home and tried to drink as much water as I could,” Francis said. “I basically laid around for two weeks.”
She said that she followed all of the safety procedures and stayed in quarantine, but still tested positive. She does not know how she was infected, but she said that her hometown has a rising number of cases.
She said the virus didn’t affect her life too much because she was home for the summer. She said she had been in quarantine all summer because her dad is immunocompromised.
“The whole summer, we stayed in because my dad has diabetes, and he has health issues,” Francis said. “We were trying to keep him safe, but he actually ended up testing positive, too.”
Francis said she views the virus more seriously after experiencing what it can do to a person’s body. She also wants people to know that it affects people differently.
“My dad had to be hospitalized and got pneumonia,” Francis said. “They did all the treatments like the antibody plasma. It’s a good thing he didn’t get sick towards the beginning because they wouldn’t have had all those treatments for him. He’s doing a lot better now.”
The virus has had an effect on community members as well. Bryce Galbraith, a new doctor at Share Medical Center, and his wife, Syre Galbraith, both tested positive for the virus.
They both caught the virus because Bryce was working on the front lines in Denver, Colorado, and they think they got it from one of his patients.
Syre Galbraith found out she tested positive the second week of March while she was in Colorado.
She said she was able to recover quickly and only felt sick for about two days.
“I started feeling ill on a Tuesday morning, and by Wednesday night, my fever was gone,” Syre Galbraith said. “I was just severely fatigued, and it was to the point where walking up the stairs made me take a seat. I had to take a breather for a second because it was so much work. By midday Thursday, I was feeling great.”
Quarantine was tough for them because they were living with Bryce’s 83-year-old grandmother. Bryce was also in residency and working in an intensive care unit with COVID-19 patients.
“We tried to quarantine anyway because we never knew if Bryce was going to bring anything home, and we were still going to be around him,” Syre Galbraith said.
She said that coping with the virus wasn’t too bad. She said that her whole family quarantined together and played a lot of board games. She also said she was relieved that they figured out early on that they tested positive.
“It was kind of a relief that we got our positives early on in the process because we were worried if Bryce was going to get us sick or not,” Syre Galbraith said.
Bryce’s grandmother did become ill, though.
“She spent three days in the hospital,” Syre Galbraith said. “She finally did come home, and we quarantined ourselves for two weeks.”
Syre Galbraith said she views the virus differently after seeing what it did to Bryce’s grandmother.
“The same thing that passed through me in two days sent her to the hospital,” she said. “I think it’s one of those things that, unless people experience it and had it be severe, then they wouldn’t view it seriously. If I had just experienced what I experienced and not seen his grandmother be so severe, I would probably have a different opinion of it.
“I hope people think about their neighbors that are older adults.”