On Instagram, a costume designer named Tarek Soliman — you probably know his work for having made Sasha Velour’s headpiece for the RuPaul’s Drag Race season 10 finale — wrote his own personal story with the virus. According to Soliman, who now lives in the USA where he moved to as an asylum seeker from Egypt, after contracting COVID-19, his symptoms led to pneumonia which sent him back to the ER.

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Here’s my story with coronavirus, especially for young people who think this virus isn’t dangerous. .😷🤒🤕 . I started feeling chills and my body felt weak on March 8th, I thought it is a normal cold/flu that will heal soon. It started hitting me when I was on the bus from DC to NYC. High temperature, severe chills, sweating, body aches, terrible headache, I stayed home for 5 days and continued to monitor my symptoms thinking that it maybe just a bad flu. After the fifth day I went to urgent care because my symptoms has been getting worse, by the time the doctor started running some tests I fainted and they called the ambulance 🚑, after they transferred me to mount Sinai. From the moment I got there I was kept in an isolated room by myself, they definitely didn’t know what to do. They ran some tests on me every 4 hours, with no information or telling me what I have or what’s wrong with me, I was shaking and felt like I was dying with only IVs in my arm. After they took some blood and swapped my nose for covid-19 test I waited again until 4 am in the morning, I got discharged and sent home after 12 hours in the ER and instructed to only take Tylenol. . the hospitals and USA is completely unprepared for this, I don’t recommend relying on hospitals or the healthcare system. After 4 days I got my test result back that I am positive. I still have the same symptoms with no progress, but I started developing pneumonia and can’t breathe normally because there is NO cure, it was followed by coughing blood, now I have no fever but I still can’t breathe normally, apparently the virus has spread into my lungs. . I am still not cured or healed from covid-19 and I will be going to the emergency room again for my developed pneumonia.. ( doctors and everyone in the ER have no idea how to deal with this virus, they are only depending on your body to fight it) . PLEASE SHARE so more people know that this isn’t something small we are dealing with, be responsible and stay home. I don’t want anyone to go through what I am going through now. Stay safe ❤️

A post shared by tarek طارق (@tarek1_1_1) on Mar 18, 2020 at 8:36pm PDT