After Paul brought it home, COVID-19 spread like wildfire to everyone in their house. Though they had some similar symptoms, they all experienced it differently and for varying periods of time over the next month.

"The second day in the hospital, my health started to decline. It's as if my body was starting to shut down. I felt like death was in my room. I literally felt like I was dying..."

Julia’s symptoms crept in like a rolling fog of fatigue and aching back pain, easy to write​ off as “anxiety” until more symptoms emerged. A couple of weeks later, flattened by COVID’s effects, it brought home that her life and her health were not in her hands.

After being hospitalized from COVID, Yvonne asked herself if she had died, would she have done everything she wanted to do. “No,” she thought. So she began to secretly work on one of her dreams.

“Then a light bulb went off. Twelve days I was asleep. The only information I had was I got shot. And the nurse said, ‘I'm glad you're better now.’ That's what I took and ran with.”

“If COVID is a hoax, then I’m a hoax. I’m proof that COVID is real.”

“People talk about the physical effects of COVID-19, but no one really talks about the mental health impact. I was not mentally prepared for this.”

“COVID didn’t come with a receipt. I don’t know where I got it and I can’t take it back.”

“This was a wake-up​ call for me. I never thought COVID-19 would catch up to me so I wanted to share my story so people take it seriously.”

“If you ever question whether God was real or not, just look at me because it could have easily, easily, easily taken me out.”

“I don't know if it was an angel or God, but my lungs were shutting down and they were trying to weigh out options for me to get more air. Then…”

“My body doesn’t respond to bacteria and viruses in the way a healthy person’s immune system responds. You’re supposed to fight it. I kind of invite it over for lunch and help it hurt me.”

“For the first week when I did go somewhere, I carried that letter that I was free of quarantine with me just kind of to show people.”

“I know I got it from my wife being that we’re together most of the time. She came home one day from work and said that everybody in her pharmacy simultaneously lost their sense of smell.”

“As more survivors were looking for ways to help, I realized we had to create a more efficient system, a better platform, to connect the survivors with the researchers to better stem the tide of this pandemic. So, we launched Survivor Corps as an open group on Facebook where anyone could join.”

“The minute I had a fever I knew I had the virus.”

“I was on call overnight in the ICU. When I came back home, I was exhausted so I went to my room to sleep. Around noon, I was really deep asleep and I heard my door​ like someone was going to break down the door…”

“I am proof positive that you can recover and that there is the possibility for a happy ending after COVID-19.”

“For me, it was a matter of me gathering everything that I believed, biblically, being a Christian and holding onto the fact that I believe this to be true.”