The Atlantic

<em>Social Distance</em>: What It’s Like to Have COVID-19

What comes after the diagnosis?

While much of the coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has rightly focused on its rising death toll, the overwhelming majority of those who contract the disease ultimately recover from it. While their experiences of the disease can vary widely—from no symptoms at all to ICU visits—these people are asking themselves similar questions after the virus runs its course: What comes next? Am I now immune—and for how long? Why did I survive while others did not?

On this episode of Social Distance, Katherine Wells calls two of her friends who have recovered from COVID-19—Karan Mahajan, a writer and professor at Brown University, and F. T. Kola, a writer and Stegner fellow at Stanford University. They share their experiences with the disease and ask James Hamblin a few questions about their future.

Listen to their full conversation here:

Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they’re published.


What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.


Katherine Wells: Tell me when all of this began.

F. T. Kola: We got together for a friend’s wedding in Miami during the last weekend of February.

It was before America really became cognizant

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