ORANGE PARK – Nowhere is safe from the reach of COVID-19.

Some areas are less heavily hit, but chances are we all know someone who is an asymptomatic carrier, or who has had it outright. Dr. Dave Mosborg, an ENT (Ear, nose, and throat) specialist at Orange Park Medical Center, is a COVID-19 survivor.

Mosborg, an Illinois native and Navy veteran, survived one of the most dangerous global pandemics of recent history.

“I had been ill for about a week,” Mosberg said. He saw his primary care physician, who placed him on antivirals. “I got a little bit better for a few days, and then got a whole lot worse.” His doctor, by that point, suspected that he had contracted the virus. The next day he was tested and waited eight days for the result. During the wait for the test result, Mosborg became convinced that he had the virus.

“I had never felt so awful, so tired and so worn out in my life,” he said. “I had mono in college, and this was 100 times worse.” He had all of the symptoms, except that he did not lose his sense of smell and never became short of breath. The fact that he never displayed any respiratory difficulty kept him from being admitted to the hospital.

“Because I never got short of breath; I never went to the hospital,” he said.

Mosborg quarantined himself on one side of his home to avoid infecting his wife. From the early point of him not feeling well, he had begun to separate from his wife by sleeping in another room and trying to keep more to himself.

His wife brought him drinks and ice and left it outside of the door. In the evenings, they ate dinner together on the back deck, while maintaining social distance “at opposite ends of the table.”

His wife hasn’t displayed any symptoms of the virus and has tested negative. Once he tested positive, she took two weeks off of work and remained at home, quarantining herself.

“From the time I tested positive to when I started feeling better was about 10 or 11 days,” said Mosborg. Over the next few days, the extreme fatigue he had been feeling began to dissipate, and his strength began to return. He was able to do more and more before needing to stop for a nap. “I gradually got a little more stamina day by day by day.”

Mosborg has had plenty of time to think about where and how he could have contracted the virus.

“The only logical place that I can think of that I got was from a patient. None of my patients, to my knowledge, that I saw in the week or two beforehand had been to Italy, had been to China, had been around anybody that knowingly had it. The suspicion, my conclusion was that they were probably an asymptomatic carrier,” he said.

He isn’t sure where he stands on the political side of the COVID-19 issue. With some states beginning to reopen their economies, Mosborg is not sure what is the correct answer.

“I’m concerned about doing too much, too fast, and then there’s going to be another wave or recurrence – and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. “I understand the economics of it. I know there’s a lot of people who are out of work and been out of work.”

He sees both sides. On one, if there is too long a wait and more businesses go under when people, for the most part, are fine, state governments will feel that backlash. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if everything happens too quickly and COVID-19 roars back, then state governments will be penalized for letting the business side of things override the “medical intelligence.”

Mosborg says that he thinks the practice of medicine may well be changed for the long term. Masks may become commonplace for even regular examination and treatment.

Mosborg, in the fashion of a medical professional, also took a moment to give thoughts on what can be done to help curb both the spread and damage to those who may contract the virus.

He says to try to be as healthy as possible; people with underlying health conditions will have a much smaller chance of coming through safely should they become positive for COVID-19.

“People between 18-50, you really need to take care of yourself and not have bad habits,” he said. “You can’t undo heart disease and lung disease and diabetes. When you’ve got those risk factors, your likelihood of not doing well is significantly increased.”

Mosborg has shown that people can survive COVID-19 and that social distancing, if appropriately executed, does work, even within the same house. He has also shown that relative health can play a big role in survivability and recovery from this possibly deadly condition.