Mr. Grizzle, 70, recalls the horror of feeling that he was going to die during his own hospital stay with the coronavirus.
“If I had been him, I probably wouldn’t have said, ‘Don’t be scared of the virus,’” Mr. Grizzle said. “I probably would have said, ‘Man, this stuff can be really rough on certain people.’ I would have said, ‘Even people my age really have a problem with it under certain conditions.’ I wouldn’t have downplayed it so much.”
As Mr. Trump made his televised return to the White House on Monday, Kerri Hill lay in her bed in Galivants Ferry, S.C., and felt a flash of recognition in a fellow coronavirus patient who looked to be struggling to breathe.
But any similarities between herself and the president soon faded.
“I got angry,” said Ms. Hill, 41, who isolated in her bedroom for weeks while her husband left meals at the doorstep and her teenage son could only wave through a window. “He whipped that mask off. It’s not been 10 days, it’s not been two weeks. If he’s positive, then he just exposed everybody.”
After Ms. Hill got sick, compounding a pre-existing heart condition, her doctors pumped her with steroids and antibiotics. She did not have access to experimental treatment, she said, something she would have welcomed.
“Don’t fear Covid? Tell that to the ones who died, the ones who buried family members, the ones with empty seats at their dining room tables, and all of us who are still suffering,” said Ms. Hill, who is nearly 200 days into her illness and still experiencing fevers and vacillating blood pressure. She plans to support Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November.