DR. MONICA BHAREL, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, was leading the state’s defense against the coronavirus when she learned an important lesson: no one is immune from the disease.
Rejoining Gov. Charlie Baker for his State House press conferences after a four-week absence, Bharel said on Friday that she had spent months preparing for the coronavirus outbreak, reading everything she could and consulting experts in Massachusetts and across the country.
She took social distancing and other precautions very seriously, but, nevertheless, she became infected. She doesn’t know how, but she indicated the experience has changed her.
“It was one thing to intellectually understand this evolving disease and an entirely different thing to personally experience it,“ she said.
Her own experience began when her husband, also a frontline healthcare employee, called her at work on March 26 to mention their daughter had a fever. Bharel had already been feeling muscle aches and fatigue, but had attributed it to lack of sleep. She tested positive for COVID-19 on March 27, as did her husband, and the family began weeks of quarantine.
Bharel’s symptoms were never serious enough to be hospitalized, and she said she continued to work, answering emails and calls throughout her recovery. But living with the virus was no easy task.
“The first week I had severe muscle aches and fever,” she said, which gave way to extreme exhaustion in the second week. “I could tell the virus had taken its toll on me,” she said.
In the third week, she said, she began feeling her strength return. Bharel was cleared for work last week by her local board of public health.
“People can and do recover and we need to remember that,” she said.
Bharel thinks her experience with the disease will bring insight to policymaking as she moves forward. She acknowledged that there’s still a lot to learn, noting that some people get the disease and never exhibit any symptoms while others end up with a breathing tube down their throat.
“My story is one of those stories,” she said, adding that she intends to volunteer for a number of studies on the disease and encouraged others to do so as well.
Gov. Charlie Baker welcomed Bharel back, saying her illness was a wake-up call for all of us that the coronavirus is not something anyone is immune from. Bharel, he said, had been a “really committed social distancer,” but “even under that scenario, the virus found a way to get to her.”
In her high-level role, Bharel was in regular contact with most of the top officials in the administration before she contracted coronavirus. The list included the governor, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, and Marylou Sudders, the secretary of health and human services.
Baker has not been tested for COVID-19, which reporters asked him about after Bharel tested positive.
Bharel urged the public to get information from reliable sources as they deal with the disease. “We may be hearing about all kinds of treatments that are unproven, and some may be dangerous,” she said, without mentioning anyone or anything specific.
Meet the Author
Freelance reporter, Formerly worked for CommonWealth
About Sarah Betancourt
Sarah Betancourt is a long-time Latina reporter in Massachusetts. Prior to joining Commonwealth, Sarah was a breaking news reporter for The Associated Press in Boston, and a correspondent with The Boston Globe and The Guardian. She has written about immigration, incarceration, and health policy for outlets like NBC, The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and the New York Law Journal. Sarah has reported stories such as a national look at teacher shortages, how databases are used by police departments to procure information on immigrants, and uncovered the spread of an infectious disease in children at a family detention center. She has covered the State House, local and national politics, crime and general assignment.
Sarah received a 2018 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her role in the ProPublica/NPR story, “They Got Hurt at Work and Then They Got Deported,” which explored how Florida employers and insurance companies were getting out of paying workers compensation benefits by using a state law to ensure injured undocumented workers were arrested or deported. Sarah attended Emerson College for a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Communication, and Columbia University for a fellowship and Master’s degree with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
About Sarah Betancourt
Sarah Betancourt is a long-time Latina reporter in Massachusetts. Prior to joining Commonwealth, Sarah was a breaking news reporter for The Associated Press in Boston, and a correspondent with The Boston Globe and The Guardian. She has written about immigration, incarceration, and health policy for outlets like NBC, The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and the New York Law Journal. Sarah has reported stories such as a national look at teacher shortages, how databases are used by police departments to procure information on immigrants, and uncovered the spread of an infectious disease in children at a family detention center. She has covered the State House, local and national politics, crime and general assignment.
Sarah received a 2018 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her role in the ProPublica/NPR story, “They Got Hurt at Work and Then They Got Deported,” which explored how Florida employers and insurance companies were getting out of paying workers compensation benefits by using a state law to ensure injured undocumented workers were arrested or deported. Sarah attended Emerson College for a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Communication, and Columbia University for a fellowship and Master’s degree with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
President Trump on Thursday told reporters that people should consider exposing themselves to light, heat, and disinfectants as potential treatments for COVID-19, and he wondered if there was a way to use disinfectants “by injection inside.” Since then, lawmakers, medical officials, and the maker of Lysol have warned against injecting and ingesting disinfectants, which are toxic and can result in death if consumed.
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