First published in USA Today March 25, 2020

“What choice do we have?” Camping all night to win the testing Lottery

The night was cold and silent, and John Dougherty wasn’t taking any more chances. He drove slowly. When he arrived at the test site, he pulled his white Honda minivan onto the shoulder of the three-lane suburban highway. He spun the key to kill the engine. It was 2:55 a.m.

Testing wouldn’t begin for another five hours. Dougherty would wait. Almost two weeks ago, his wife got sick. They worried she had the coronavirus, but the first test came back negative. They thought: Maybe it was just the flu. Dougherty kept scrubbing the house with disinfectant wipes. He still wore a mask, but sometimes it hung loose around his neck.

“I let my guard down,” said Dougherty, 64. “I had to take care of her.”

Dougherty’s wife has been in the hospital five days now. She is alive because a machine is forcing oxygen into her lungs. She is alone, and no one may visit.

Now Dougherty feels like he’s caught the flu. The fever, the aches. Under federal rules, these symptoms qualify him to get him tested for coronavirus.

His daughter Lauren, 19, has a cough.

Sitting in his car, Dougherty worried. What if a cough isn't enough? What if living with two parents, both of whom appear to have the virus, is not enough? According to rules set up for the testing site, Lauren Dougherty would not be tested for coronavirus until she, too, develops a fever and chest pains. Still, John Dougherty wanted to try to get her a test.

So on Tuesday, in the middle of the night, he arrived at Bergen Community College. Lauren, wearing pajamas, rode in the back seat, as far away from her father as she possibly could sit. Dougherty’s plan: beg the doctors to make an exception, and test them both.

“I can’t leave her home” in Bloomfield, Dougherty said. “My daughter has a cough. That’s worrisome. We’ve been together since this started.”

As Dougherty talked, his blue mask moved around his face. After each sentence, he paused to press his thumbs against the mask, molding the fabric tightly to the curve of his nose.

It wasn’t much. To prevent his daughter from getting the virus, apparently, it was the best that anyone could do.

“The way the federal government has handled this is a disgrace,” Dougherty said.

Big failure writ small

In the middle of the night, on the shoulder of Paramus Road, at ground zero for the coming pandemic, this is what that problem looked like. The first car, a black Lexus SUV, parked at the entrance to Bergen Community College at 11:55 p.m., more than eight hours before testing was scheduled to start. Five minutes later the driver was joined by another, Sandy Richardson, who sat in his lime green Dodge Challenger with its motor rumbling, windows cracked open, heat cranked up to full.

“I feel fine,” said Richardson, 54, a nurse at a nursing home in Englewood. “But I don’t trust Trump. If he calls this a hoax, it’s probably real.”

For an hour, the line grew by ones and twos. By 4 a.m., another car seemed to join the line every minute. At 5 a.m., 101 cars sat in a row that stretched half a mile south, nearly to Century Road.

“I’ve been here every morning since Friday, starting at 6,” said Safran Ishmael, 27, who drove 25 miles from her home in Maplewood to arrive at the college at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. “I was coughing really bad, and I had a fever of 101. But by the time I got here, the line was wrapped all the way around the block.”

Before Amazon humbled the big-box retailers, Black Friday was a family tradition for millions of Americans, many of whom camped outside Walmarts and Best Buys. A few doorbusters devolved into brawls. But most of the time, people in the impromptu campsites found humor in their silly shared suffering.

No one camped on the shoulder of Paramus Road on Tuesday morning. No one smiled. Everyone stayed in their cars, running the heat. Most people reclined their seats and tried to catch a little sleep.

Instead of waiting in line for discounted televisions, Americans are waiting in line for lifesaving medical care.

“I don’t understand why there are so many people and so few tests,” Ishmael said. “This is crazy.”

Walk the line

Nancy works at a grocery store in Bergen County. She loves her customers, she said, but she thinks they’ve made her sick. She arrived in line in her battered Honda minivan at 4 a.m. and took her temperature — she had a fever of 100.5 degrees. Then she looked around.

"This line is crazy!" said Nancy, of Paterson, who asked that her last name not be used. "It looks like something out of a movie."

With no help from the health care system, Nancy and her family have improvised. She has locked herself inside her bedroom. When she gets hungry, she knocks on the door. Family members bring her a plate of food, leaving it on the floor. Nancy opens the door a crack, takes the plate, and cleans the floor where it sat with a Clorox wipe.

She’s too congested to lie down. Instead she tries to sleep by wedging her body between two columns of pillows.

“It feels like someone’s tightening a belt around my chest,” she said. “I’m just tired. I haven’t really slept in days.”

Every 30 seconds, Nancy fell into a coughing fit. She worries her coughs will spread the virus to her son, two daughters and grandson, all of whom live with her.

“It’s scary!” Nancy said. “My mom is 70. I told her not to come over to my house, no matter what.”

Kim Gomez's fever has held steady at 104 degrees for the last three days. On Tuesday she was the third person in line, sitting in her orange Volkswagen SUV while eating bananas and Ritz crackers.

“I feel so bad! Like somebody is squeezing my head,” said Gomez, who has continued to work from home as an import coordinator. “I went to an emergency room. They told me to come here. There’s nowhere else to go!”

When John Dougherty finally arrived at the front of the line, he wasn't required to beg. He's ill, he explained. His wife of 36 years is living on a ventilator, and his daughter has a cough. Would the doctors please test her?

Lauren Dougherty won the lottery. She got tested. It shouldn’t come to this.

“I’m hanging in there,” John Dougherty said. “We have to. What choice do we have?”