As veteran New York City radio reporter Alice Stockton-Rossini is dealing with her parents testing positive for the coronavirus, she says people should be demanding that everyone be tested.
Stockton-Rossini's mother was the first in the family to be diagnosed with the coronavirus. While Alice has not been tested, she has experienced nearly all of the symptoms.
Stockton-Rossini spoke to WBGO's News Director Doug Doyle and talked about how the coronavirus has impacted nearly her entire family in Ocean County.
"I'm feeling much better. I feel like I have a cold now. I felt like I had the flu about two weeks, just fever, chills. I felt like a had a head cold. Everything was in my sinuses but I didn't have any of the congestion we've heard a lot about and how it affects the lungs. That is not true in every single case. Not everybody gets issues with their lungs. My husband, my parents, my sister, none of us have had issues were our lungs. So if that's a symptom that you're waiting to kind of see it that develops before you take any kind of action don't because the virus seems to present itself in different ways. I'm taking care of my parents now. My mom tested positive for coronavirus in a South Jersey hospital. She's on the mend. We're lucky she was able to get some malaria drug and that really helped but she had to wait three days in the hospital while the test results were coming back and that was very frustrating because she was sick for a full week that. Now my father has it. He was prescribed the malaria drug and he's just starting to feel better."
Stockton-Rossini who was covering the coronavirus story in New York says she still questions how is this possible.
"How could we as news people have been on the radio and television just a few weeks before kind of saying 'well it's like the flu, it's not that bad, we're going to be able to contain this' not knowing how this thing was gonna grow, like something out of a horror novel. It just developed into something we could never have anticipated. It's depressing. It's scary. We've lost two good friends in our family to this virus as a result. They already had compromised immune systems. That continues to be very difficult to get through. I haven't been back to work in almost two weeks. I refuse to walk around depressed. I refuse to walk around like I have no future. I am going to keep moving forward."
Stockton-Rossini, who has provided reports for WBGO through the years, explained why she hasn't been tested yet and why she strongly feels the federal government needs to put a plan in place to test everyone for coronavirus.
"I exhibited symptoms and I couldn't get tested. I live part-time in North Jersey and so I couldn't get tested where I lived there. I didn't have enough symptoms, the symptoms weren't bad enough. I came down here (Ship Bottom) and couldn't get tested here. My husband couldn't get tested here and was going to work everyday. And listening to all the news reports and reading everything I could get my hands on it seems to me and I'm not an expert that in South Korea, for instance, what they did is they just everybody. It seems to be a widespread belief among medical professionals that once you exhibit symptoms it's too late. You have already infected anyone you have come into contact with. Once you've got the chills, once you've got a fever, once you're sneezing, once you've got that sinus headache, once you're having difficulty breathing, you have already passed that virus. It seems to me that in countries where they've made widespread testing available were people asymptomatic were being tested as people who were symptomatic that's how they been able to contain this virus. That's what community leaders, mayors, local politicians that's what we should all be pushing for."
Click above to hear the entire conversation with Alice Stockton-Rossini.
