This is how one Boise family got COVID-19 and a young dad ended up in the hospital
The Morales family’s 8-year-old twin boys had a little cough. It didn’t seem like anything big.
But slowly, over the course of two weeks, several members of the family — from a 3-month-old baby girl to her 46-year-old grandfather — got sick with COVID-19. They tested positive for the coronavirus. One of them had to be hospitalized.
The small cluster is a case study in how easily the virus can spread, even when people are mostly following prevention guidelines, and in how it affects children and young adults.
The worst hit of the family was Bryson Buffington, a 23-year-old who works in retail at a hardware store. And, as with most cases of COVID-19, it’s hard to know for sure whether he caught the virus at work, or from the two boys, or somewhere else.
With an incubation period of up to two weeks and wide community spread in Ada County, tracing the origin of the virus when someone gets sick is like trying to assemble a puzzle made up of mostly invisible pieces.
Staying home, wearing masks
Amanda Morales, a 38-year-old government employee, says her household was diligent about staying home and avoiding exposure after the coronavirus started to circulate in the U.S. They took steps to isolate themselves even before Gov. Brad Little issued a stay-home order in March.
Their son, Bryson, had a baby in March, and Morales and her husband, Carlos, waited a month to meet their granddaughter. When the stay-home order lifted and Idaho began to reopen over the spring, the family still kept mostly to their “pod” — Amanda and Carlos, their biological daughter and five to six foster children; and Bryson and his girlfriend and their baby, who visited almost every day.
Amanda had started working from home. Carlos, who is a flooring installer, continued to work but tried to stay socially distanced from his fellow installers and their clients. The children — ages 6 to 17 — stayed home until June, when they went back to their child care center.
“We made the risky decision to send the kids out of the home for child care during the summer ... because I needed to be able to work, and being able to work at home with six or seven kids at home was close to impossible,” Amanda said.
Bryson kept going to work at a hardware store to help maintain the income of his household. He wore a mask, as did his coworkers.
“I’d say I definitely wasn’t into the whole mask thing. I was a little skeptical,” he said. “I also knew, for my health, it was an important thing, so I did wear it anyway.”
Bryson has a neuromuscular disorder, myasthenia gravis, that was caused by an autoimmune problem. The family discovered his illness five years ago, when he was in high school and started to have trouble breathing. He eventually had to be intubated and placed on a ventilator but had been managing the disease before he got COVID-19.
He is on disability for his health condition but chose to keep working, partly because disability payments are so low, Amanda Morales explained.
“When this whole thing started, (Bryson) was my primary concern,” Amanda said. “I accepted a long time ago that it would hit us ... and he would end up in the hospital.”
Where did they catch the coronavirus?
When Amanda Morales and her family got sick, she thought back to early June.
There were a few different points of exposure, and she has since contacted people she was around in the weeks before and since anyone in the family showed symptoms.
Here’s what happened, according her recollection and son Bryson’s recollection.
The weekend of June 13:
Carlos Morales became a U.S. citizen on June 11. It was a monumental event for him and the family. There was no ceremony to commemorate his years of study and work on the path to citizenship.
And while their family stayed home as much as possible between March and June, the isolation was tough. Their extended family is large and social, Amanda said. She felt pressure to attend gatherings — and she missed seeing her loved ones.
“Life takes a toll, and you just want to be around other people ... for five minutes,” Amanda said.
The weekend after Carlos gained citizenship, Idaho had just entered Stage 4, which allowed “gatherings, both public and private, of more than 50 people, where appropriate physical distancing and precautionary measures are observed ...”
The Morales family decided to have a celebration, inviting over family and close friends. They tried to follow precautions and offered hand sanitizer.
“We risked it that weekend,” Amanda said. While she considered it a risk, the celebration was within the state’s rules for what was appropriate at the time, she added.
The week of June 15: Kids show symptoms, but it seems like a cold
The Morales family’s brood went back to child care in June, after spending much of the spring school semester at home.
Amanda was glad to have time to work.
But at the tail end of the week of June 15, the twin boys started coughing. They didn’t have a fever or any other symptoms, and the family assumed it was just one of the many colds that make the rounds in schools and day cares.
“We didn’t think it was COVID at all. In retrospect, it was probably COVID,” Amanda said.
Their child care center closed the week of June 22, “due to a staff member having potentially been exposed to COVID-19,” Amanda said.
The kids all stayed home. A family friend needed help with child care that week, so Amanda agreed to watch her son for a couple of days.
The following weekend, as June was coming to a close, Carlos, Bryson and one of the foster children got a cough. They assumed they’d caught the cold from the twins, whose health was back to normal at that point.
“I started getting a runny nose. That whole entire week, I had a runny nose and a really, really mild cough,” he said. “I started getting really congested, just really groggy, didn’t feel great.”
He thought it might be a cold, but he also wondered if some of the symptoms were his neuromuscular disorder acting up.
Bryson admits he went to a friend’s house for a dinner, where he didn’t take precautions like wearing a mask, despite not feeling great. Remarkably, he says, none of the people at that dinner got sick or tested positive.
June 29: A family emergency, a trip to Seattle
The Morales household’s routine fell apart with a phone call at 5 a.m. Monday, June 29 — Carlos’s father had died in Mexico.
That event sent members of the family to a few different places, before they knew they were infected.
Carlos and his brother decided to go to Mexico to say goodbye to their father, mourn with family and attend to final arrangements. But Carlos had just become a citizen; he didn’t have a U.S. passport. The death of a parent qualifies for an emergency passport issuance — but only in person, in Seattle.
Amanda Morales planned to drive her husband there and immediately return to Boise.
But what about the six children at home?
They made arrangements: One foster daughter would stay with another family, in respite care. (She never tested positive for the virus.) Amanda’s sister would take the couple’s 6-year-old biological daughter with them on a trip. (She never got the virus, nor did Amanda’s sister’s family.) And Bryson, his girlfriend and their baby were already in the family “pod,” so they would stay at the Morales home with the other four kids. (Most of them got the virus.)
June 30: A trip to Seattle
Amanda and Carlos drove west from Boise on June 30, a Tuesday. Their appointment at the passport agency was July 1.
Carlos was scheduled to leave Seattle on a flight to Guadalajara the night of July 1 — and, since Amanda needed to return to Boise, friends in the Seattle area agreed to take Carlos and his brother to the airport that evening.
“We were all careful with our masks and our hand sanitizer and everything,” Amanda said. “We did go to an IHOP there in Seattle, but we sanitized on our way in, and while we were there.”
Meanwhile, Bryson had developed a fever: 99, 100 and then 102 degrees for two days.
The night of July 1: The virus takes down Bryson
Carlos flew out of the Seattle airport at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, July 1. Amanda pulled into their driveway in Boise around midnight, took a shower and fell into bed, exhausted from lack of sleep. But her phone rang again.
This time it was Bryson’s girlfriend. “Bryson’s not feeling well,” she told Amanda. “We’re going to the hospital.”
Bryson’s fever had broken, but now he was struggling to breathe.
Amanda thought back to the day she left for Seattle. Bryson had told her it seemed like the infusion he got on a regular basis for his immune disorder wasn’t kicking in as usual.
“I’m having a little trouble swallowing, a little trouble holding my head up,” he had told her. Amanda had urged him to call his neurologist, who suggested he get a COVID-19 test. The earliest appointment for a test was Thursday or Friday, two to three days away.
For months, health care providers and public health officials in Idaho have stressed that hospitalized patients are the highest priority for tests. Each test kit is precious, due to the ongoing national shortage of supplies, labs and staff to run COVID-19 tests.
Idaho’s coronavirus testing guidelines say that a patient like Bryson, who was symptomatic and had underlying conditions, is a top priority and should receive same-day testing. But Idaho’s overwhelmed system for COVID-19 testing either did not, or could not, bump him to the front of the line.
Bryson told his mother, “I’m feeling fine, I feel OK. What’s even the point (of getting a test)?”
In a matter of hours, he couldn’t breathe and needed to be admitted to St. Luke’s Downtown Boise hospital. He tested positive there for the coronavirus.
July 2: The COVID-19 symptoms spread
Carlos landed in Mexico at 4 a.m. and learned that his son was now in the hospital.
“He’s COVID positive,” Amanda said. “And maybe the little cold symptoms we’ve been having aren’t a cold.”
The couple talked about what to do. Should Carlos and his brother stay in Mexico? Should they attend the funeral? Or should they just turn around and come home?
They decided to do the latter. Even with masks and hand sanitizer, if they were infected, they risked passing the virus to people in Mexico. “If it’s devastating here, it’s beyond devastating there,” Amanda said.
They never met up with family.
“That was a heart-wrenching decision. He opted to skip his father’s farewell funeral and be there for his mom and sisters,” she said.
They immediately boarded a plane back to Seattle and got a ride back to Boise, arriving home at 10 p.m. on July 2.
By that time, “all of us here at home were symptomatic,” Amanda said. And, soon, so was Carlos.
July 3: Getting the family tested
The morning of Friday, July 3, eight members of the Morales and Buffington households got in their cars and headed to the AFC urgent care clinic in Garden City.
They had mild symptoms at the time — two of them had only lost their sense of taste. But all of them could say with certainty, now that Bryson was diagnosed, that they’d been exposed to the virus. That qualified them for a test.
So they filled out paperwork and got in line for the infamous nasal swab. They also got flu and strep tests.
After that, the families “just came home and quarantined, ordered groceries online, just hunkered down,” Amanda said.
Mid-July: Bryson fights coronavirus in the hospital
Bryson’s body was handling the virus well enough that he didn’t need to be in the ICU. But his breathing had gotten worse.
In the beginning, he says, breathing felt “like when you’re standing in a mister on a patio, and you’re breathing in the mist.”
As it got worse, he could feel the liquid taking up space in his lungs. He would breathe shallower and faster, and it was exhausting work.
“I did have one bad night where I was kind of crying, because I was missing everybody, but it went hand-in-hand with having a hard time breathing,” he said. “When it gets hard, that’s when you really need someone there with you, and you can’t. One of the nurses was there, and she was holding my hand and kind of comforting me.”
His experience with the virus has been like having the flu and food poisoning at the same time, he said.
The doctors and nurses gave Bryson a few different medications. They gave him antibiotics and remdesivir, a medication that can help COVID-19 patients recover. And about a week into his hospital stay, they gave Bryson a diuretic to try to pull the fluid out of his lungs.
The hospital stays — nights especially — were hard on his body. He often struggled to get enough oxygen, even with tubes forcing it up his nostrils. His oxygen levels, which are normally in the 95% to 100% range, fell as low as 77%.
Bryson had been intubated before, when he first experienced a medical crisis from his disorder. He was grateful he didn’t have to go through that again.
But it was tough on his mind and spirit, too. Bryson was an extrovert stuck in a hospital room by himself. Because the virus is so contagious, he couldn’t leave the room, and health care providers couldn’t spend much time in the room with him.
“I’ve never had a very worrisome outlook on life. I’m like a half-glass-is-full kind of person. But emotionally it’s been harder than normal,” he said. “I used to say that I let my mom do the worrying. She’d do all the worrying, and I’d just lay here and get better.”
It’s also difficult to have a new baby and be “stripped away from them” for weeks, he said.
He stayed in touch with his family and saw his baby daughter on video chats. Still, it was two weeks of forced solitude. And while his mother had always been a willing team captain in his medical care, this time he had a disease whose complications can be sudden and severe, and his mom couldn’t do a thing.
“If your loved one is there ... they’re all alone,” his mother said. “He’s a grown man (but) I see him as my baby, right? He’s just in tears. He’s sad, he’s lonely, he wants to come home.”
July 9, 10, 11 and onward: The lingering COVID-19
The coronavirus test results came back on July 9, six days after the family got tested at the Garden City clinic.
Positive: Amanda, Carlos, Bryson’s baby and three of the foster kids.
Negative: Bryson’s girlfriend Morgan and one of the foster kids — surprisingly, one of the twin boys who first showed symptoms in June.
Everyone who tested positive had symptoms. Some family members took over-the-counter medication to ease headaches, pain or cough.
“I had a headache like crazy, like a train ran over my head,” Amanda said. Her lungs also hurt, similar to having bronchitis. “I did have a little bit of body aches and maybe a low, low grade fever for like a day or two, but mostly just feeling like I got ran over by a train.”
As for the kids, it “barely fazed” them, she said.
How the virus spread to others
They reached out to people who may have been exposed.
Bryson and Morgan’s housemates got tested. One of them was positive.
A boy whom Amanda Morales watched for a couple of days, so his mother could work, also tested positive.
Carlos’s brother got tested several days after his trip with Carlos and Amanda. He was negative, even though he’d been in close contact and sharing air with them for two days. Amanda attributes that to everyone wearing masks the whole time.
“We were really careful in the car (ride to Seattle). Everybody was wearing their masks,” Amanda said.
Local public health departments are responsible for handling the “contact tracing” to find out where the virus is spreading. The departments are notified of positive tests and reach out to patients to talk with them about their activities — people with whom they interacted, places they went, times they may have been exposed or exposed others.
The first call Amanda received from Boise-based Central District Health was on July 10, seeking to talk with Bryson.
The following Monday, the department started contact tracing on the rest of the family, she said.
The aftermath: bills and a long recovery
Amanda is starting to see the financial fallout of COVID-19. The families’ coronavirus tests were fully covered by insurance. But the flu and strep tests weren’t, and the Morales family’s bills for those tests have been more than $200 per person.
The charges for Bryson’s hospitalization have arrived: $176,000. Because he has private insurance and disability-related Medicaid coverage, Amanda says her son will have to pay little or none of that.
Bryson finally went home from the hospital on July 14. But now, more than two weeks later, he still gets winded easily and hasn’t been able to return to work.
His outlook on following guidelines, like wearing a mask, changed while he was in the hospital, he said.
“It’s about looking after your neighbor, looking after your fellow countrymen,” he said. “I wasn’t too crazy about the mask, but it was from a selfish standpoint. ... It’s not about me, it’s about the people who could potentially become ill because of me.”
This story was originally published August 3, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
