NC State swimming & diving Associate Head Coach Bobby Guntoro revealed his personal battle with coronavirus (COVID-19) this week on Instagram, adding a familiar face to the infection that has resulted in a global pandemic.
After more than two weeks of being afflicted with everything from fever to exhaustion to a loss of taste and smell, Guntoro is on the mend. As someone whose entire household was impacted by coronavirus, with both his wife and young son having tested positive, the Wolfpack leader revealed his battle in order to spread the word that the situation is real.
Speaking with SwimSwam today, Guntoro conveyed, “I want people to understand that, even though things are opening back up and that can be a good thing, that the virus is still there. We need to make sure we’re taking care of ourselves.”
And he is speaking from experience, having tested positive for coronavirus after coming down with symptoms quite suddenly. “My wife and I had been practicing social distancing, wearing masks and I really don’t know how I got it.
I came back from one of my daily walks and was really sweating,” he explained. “I took a shower and just felt ill thereafter.
“My wife, who is a Physician’s Assistant, recognized my symptoms the next day of fever and being exhausted and she urged me to get tested.”
Upon waiting for the test results, Guntoro said his condition went totally downhill over the next few days. “I could barely walk. I couldn’t smell anything. I couldn’t taste anything and I didn’t even want to eat.” As a healthy man who walks nearly 10 miles a day, he wound up losing 18 pounds in 8 days.
“Days 5 to 8 were the absolute worst for me. You are just so exhausted, have no energy. That’s when the cough hit. And my head was pounding.”
Despite these symptoms, Guntoro believes he had a mild case, as he never encountered problems breathing, the one telltale sign state department officials told him would necessitate his going to the hospital.
“The North Carolina State Health Department has been very helpful. They told me to go to the hospital if I had trouble breathing, but it never got to that point. I took Tylenol for a few days but transitioned to ingesting vitamins and constantly hydrating myself. That was the only thing I could do.
Guntoro says his official quarantine end date is tomorrow, June 20th, but he and his wife, who only displayed a symptom of a fever briefly, will still play it safe in terms of minimizing contact with anyone.
Based on his experience of leaning on family members to help during the days he was down for the count with the virus, Guntoro does express his concern for students returning to campuses everything in the fall.
“My worry is that I had someone to take care of me, but college kids may be by themselves. Someone needs to be able to take care of someone with coronavirus for 24/7 in monitoring health, hunger, and thirst.
“But, then again, college kids are a lot younger and strong than I am. The virus is so weird in who it impacts and how.”
Evaluating his health at about 75% as of today, Guntoro reminds everyone to be diligent and that the fight against coronavirus is most definitely not over.
North Carolina is one of several states that has seen a dramatic increase in new cases of the coronavirus over the last few weeks. The state has averaged around 1,300 new cases per day over the last 7 days. Wake County, where NC State is located, has seen the state’s second-highest case load with just over 3,700 cases and 43 confirmed deaths from COVID-19.
Death rate does not paint the full picture. Surviving doesn’t mean healthy. We still don’t even know if it means you can’t get it again.
https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/What-they-don-t-tell-you-about-surviving-15347792.php?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=CMS+Sharing+Tools+%28Desktop%29&utm_medium=referral&fbclid=IwAR2yS4wRGD3T31kypvx9BPaRLoSypWF320pOcR_uq3fSatq5JDnOnvyNL28
SFGate, very biased. No thanks
Welcome to America’s favorite gameshow: name the commenter who said this!
“Anything that disagrees with you is a conspiracy theory? Did you even read it or you just concluded right away. I didn’t say it was a fact, I said it was a concern. Ad hominem attack rather than an attack on the content.”
weren’t you the guy last week who posted data from a conspiracy theory site, got called on it, switched to data that was only peripherally related to your original comment, and then proceeded to post another piece from the Davenport, IA equivalent of SFGate? hmmm…
Every positive development leads to a new distortion. We’re doing more testing = but they’re not accurate and still not enough. The death rate is plunging = the infection rate is rising. The hospitalization rate is declining = we still haven’t even begun the second wave.
chill dude
Nope. I’m fighting propaganda. I’m on a mission. Any story about Covid and then people commenting we can’t go back to normal, I’ll be here. I’ll cite statistics as much as possible.
I’m gonna hold the line.
Hope you’re having a great day!
Considering most people’s jobs and “return to work” protocols are being determined by professionals, I don’t think your one sided statistics mean much.
Luckily the people making the decisions are following science and real statistics. Plenty of big corporations, universities etc. are working from home as long as possible. There’s probably a reason they’re doing that.
Big corporations can afford to let people work from home and for some this overreaction has been a boon eliminating their smaller competition. Small businesses and small colleges can’t afford to stay closed. Scientists in general will study something forever and avoid all risks. Luckily we have some leaders who can take the information available to them and make decisions about reopening or not closing to begin with even in the face of hysteria that have proven correct for their states.
Bro you need a diary
I see the media going after “red states” now.
Consider Florida.
12,673 HAVE BEEN hospitalized in Florida since hospitalizations began in March. The vast majority of those patients are home now. Florida has never had over ~2,000 people hospitalized with #Covid, 3.5% of its total hospital beds. Which presents a slightly different picture.
Glad to hear you’re on the mend Bobby.
From the prestigious Oxford team regarding social distancing. Well worth a read:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-evidence-is-lacking-for-2-meter-distancing/
Don’t get played by the MSM. You’re better than that.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, “Slow down the testing, please!’”
Donald Trump
6/20/2020
And now NC is cooking their Covid Books. Check this out MDswimdad:
https://mobile.twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1274420233113989120
Good example of how unreliable the number of positive tests and positivity %s are when there is no ongoing standard for who and how many to test. We’ve known from whole population examples and antibody results that the asymptomatic rate is high and ~10X the number of positive tests had or have it. Luckily most governors are finally acting based on hospitalization and deaths and those continue to go down overall and are flat in the ‘hot spot’ states.
Hospitalizations are definitely not flat in all of the hot-spot areas. Here is the chart for the Texas Medical Center in Houston: https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/tmc-covid-19-icu-occupancy-trend/
I haven’t seen similar data for other areas, but in Houston, at a minimum, hospitalizations are definitely spiking.
Statewide deaths in Texas are, as you indicated, bouncing around a bit but generally below peak.
Hopefully with better therapeutics, deaths will continue to go down. And still barely over 20%. But yes, time will tell.
How are schools supposed to open in the fall? Are they prepared to deal with campus wide outbreaks? And what happens if students or staff die, can the sue the school?
Can they sue if they die of influenza? How about other viruses? Or this virus has a special category? What’s your end game here? Have you looked at death figures by age category compared to flu?
I am interested to see what happens with other infectious less deadly illnesses such as rotavirus, RSV, adenoviruses, flu, etc. We may have shut them all down. Or everything might come back with a vengeance along with covid.