“They didn’t know what to do with me,” Theresa Ball Meyers-Green said. “I was the first one.”

On March 24, 2020, Meyers-Green felt a little nauseous and dizzy. She has a perforated eardrum, and says that’s what normally happens when she gets a little water in it, so she tried to brush it off and get on with her day at the Walmart Vision Center. She works there as a part-time optician. She went home later, and went to bed that night like normal.

“And at two o'clock in the morning I woke up screaming,” she said.

She said she believed she was in sepsis, a body’s extreme reaction to infection. She had been through that with an illness several years before.

“Get me to the hospital” Meyers-Green told her husband. “I said ‘I'm in full blown sepsis, only it's worse this time because the pain is so much worse.’”

At the emergency room, Meyers-Green was given a swab test for the flu more than once, despite her insistence she was in sepsis.

“I really wasn’t friendly to them,” she admitted. “I was sure I knew what was going on.”

After doing bloodwork, they told her she was not in sepsis. At that point they brought her to the ICU and isolated her. Meyers-Green said while she experienced extreme body pains and the migraine symptom that has been associated with it, she didn’t have a fever.

“But I’m an oddball,” she said.

It took more than a day for them to get the pain under control. Meyers-Green was given oxygen, and breathing treatments, but wasn’t put on a ventilator. She did get pneumonia.

“I'll tell you what, it could have been so much worse,” she said. “I'm so thankful.”

She stayed at the hospital until Saturday morning, when they sent her home. She said she would have rather stayed at the hospital, given the choice.

“Sunday, the health department called me and said ‘You are positive’”, Meyers-Green said.

As rumors of the first positive case began to swirl through Houghton County, the health department issued letters to Meyers-Green and her family that they needed to stay on the premises of their property or they would be put into protective custody.

“Which meant we would be jailed,” Meyers-Green said. “And people were horrible.”

She said that people were watching her home and calling the health department, reporting that they had left the premises or had gone into stores, or spread the virus intentionally, none of which was true, she said.

Meyers-Green said she must have had contact with someone non-symptomatic who was shopping at Walmart. She had volunteered to pick up a shift covering the self-checks.

“And at that time, there was no masking,” Meyers-Green said. “They tried to trace me to the places that I had went, and that was the only place that would have been out of my norm.”

Almost 11 months from when she was infected, Meyers-Green says she’s still pretty far from feeling well.

“Oh yeah, no,” she said with an ironic laugh. “I don't have taste. I don't have smell. I have intestinal issues. I have breathing issues. There's days like today—I don't know if it's because I got the shot or what but I feel like a Mack truck hit me. I have cognitive problems…”

Feb. 15 is Meyers-Green’s 65th birthday, but she was able to get her first vaccine dose on Feb. 3, the day before our interview, because of her position as an optician.

She said since having COVID-19, she sometimes smells gasoline inexplicably. She said eating is an altogether different experience than it used to be.

“I can taste things that are extremely salty and really sweet,” Meyers-Green said. “But if I sat down to eat a pasty it would taste like garbage. I don't drink any caffeine but I love the smell of coffee. Now it's horrendous. It's horrible. Peanut butter’s horrible.”

She also had to change her perfume, toothpaste and shampoo, “Because my mind thinks it’s something else,” and her doctors have told her they don’t think her senses will change back to what they were.

Meyers-Green gets upset when people, including her own brothers, suggest what she caught was “just the flu”.

“…because I've had the flu and it's never put me in the hospital. It's never taken my smell and taste away. It's never given me pneumonia. It's never done any of this,” she said.

The virus has progressed differently for others in Houghton County, even people living close together.

“I retired due to different health conditions—I think March of last year—roughly a year ago,” said former 97th District Court Judge Mark Wisti.

He said his first COVID-19 symptom was just coughing, in mid-October of 2020.

“And my doctor ordered a test and I had COVID-19,” Wisti said.

It took a couple days for him to get results back. They didn’t do much contact tracing because both Wisti and his wife, Amy, were already isolating as strictly as possible.

“My immune system is very badly compromised to begin with,” Wisti said. “And we weren't going anywhere. I have to go to the hospital quite frequently.”

He speculates the hospital is where he was exposed. His wife also tested positive, but showed few symptoms.

Amy Wisti is a financial supporter of Late Edition.

“My symptoms were so minimal, I would not have gotten tested if Mark hadn't already tested positive,” Amy said.

She said it really worries her how many people might be carrying COVID-19 and spreading it while thinking they’re healthy, or only slightly sick.

“I had like a slight cough one day, and then I had a runny nose one day, and that was it,” she said. “If I had those symptoms and thought, ‘Oh, maybe I should be tested,’ I would have, you know, said to myself, ‘Amy, you're being ridiculous.’”

Likely due to his compromised immune system, Mark Wisti’s case was severe.

“Way severe,” he said. “I ended up being airlifted to the Mayo Clinic and spent a week down there.”

Wisti didn’t need to be put on a ventilator, but his blood oxygen level started dropping dramatically whenever he undertook any kind of activity, even just moving about. They put him on a heavy dose of oxygen and he entered intensive care for about a day before his airlift to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He said they gave him “whatever Donald Trump got” and that he wasn’t really asking a lot of questions at the time because he was so sick.

“Yeah, Remdesivir,” he said. “And I got that and I probably got something else. But I really wasn't asking.”

Remdesivir was approved for treatment of RNA viruses including coronaviruses by the FDA in late October 2020. Previously it was only approved under an Emergency Use Authorization from May 1, 2020.

Wisti said he felt fine when they discharged him, except he had difficulty breathing.

“Which I guess is a big thing,” he said.

Wisti has undergone a double lung transplant, end-stage kidney disease, a kidney transplant, and numerous complications.

“So compared to what I’ve been through, it wasn’t that hard,” he said.

He’s still not recovered, though. His lung function, which was already as low as 87%, dipped to 61% and was at about 73% when we spoke in the first week of February.

“So it’s functional at that level but that’s still a—they don’t know if it’s going to come back or not,” Wisti said.

He said that because of his other conditions, the loss of lung function is more irritating than significantly impactful to his life. At 64, he hasn’t been able to get vaccinated yet, despite his medical condition.

Wisti said people making comments along the lines of ‘if you’re afraid of the virus, you can just stay home’ is offending to someone with his medical conditions.

“Someone like me, it’s almost at the point where you start feeling like you’re viewed as a second-class citizen,” he said.

He was already isolating himself, he said, and he’s prepared to continue that if that’s what is required to get through the pandemic. But the dismissal is insulting.

“There's ways of expressing that other than, you know, ‘Stay home, coward’, which is, you know, you hear that…,” he said.

The impacts of contracting COVID-19 aren’t constrained to a person’s own health, or even the people they live with, either.

“We ended up having to shut down for two weeks, because we didn’t know if anybody else had been exposed,” Donna Jarman, owner of the Mosquito Inn, said.

Three of her employees contracted COVID-19, and as a result, they were closed over Labor Day weekend in 2020. She said they were worried about all the employees.

“It was just scary, you know?” Jarman said. “Because to have three of our younger, healthier ones get it?”

Her and several other employees were tested and no more came back positive.

Jarman said the Mosquito Inn was following the rules with sanitizing and masking, and continues to do so, but losing out on Labor Day weekend business in the midst of a year where they’ve had to contend with limited or no seating is difficult. The Mosquito Inn, on M-26 outside of Toivola, depends heavily on ATV and snowmobile traffic. People riding the trail like to have somewhere inside to take a break and eat.

Jarman said that since some seating is now allowed, and that the area “actually got snow” the business has been doing comparatively well.

“But that’s normal,” she said. “This is normally our busiest time, right?”

Meyers-Green, who’s also back to work now, is really frustrated that some people continue to resist wearing masks in stores.

Many stores, including the local Walmart, still don’t insist on it from their customers, despite their corporate policy.

From Walmart’s corporate newsroom, dated Nov. 25, 2020

“I wear one for ten hours a day, and there’s days I can’t breathe and so I have to have my inhaler with me,” Meyers-Green said. “But they’re crying because they need to have a mask on for a half hour… I don’t know why they can’t just do this for somebody else.”

Many stores solicit customer comments, including Walmart. Below is a screenshot from their website.

The Houghton Walmart is store #2192.

EDIT: You can also report non-compliance on a variety of COVID-19 orders including for workplace safety, professional licensing, and even licensed health facilities directly to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services at this website.