Campaigning in the COVID-19 era has been hard enough for politicians who build their careers on face-to-face interactions. But campaigning with COVID-19 is even more difficult, a state Senate candidate learned.

Linda Patterson, a retired high school principal and one of two Democrats vying for the chance to challenge sitting Republican Sen. Vince Leach, was diagnosed in the first week of April with COVID-19 by her physicians, though she has been unable to obtain an official test.

Suddenly, Patterson’s focus shifted from campaigning to battling a disease that feels bearable some days and lays her low on others. Instead of campaign updates, she’s sharing daily updates on COVID-19 with her supporters.

“Yesterday I was feeling pretty good, and today I wake up and it’s feeling pretty challenging,” Patterson said April 13. “I try to keep a stiff upper lip laced with a lot of positive energy. I’m going to get through this.”

Patterson assumes she contracted the disease during a long weekend of campaign events before the state shut down. After a few weeks of feeling mildly under the weather, Patterson’s symptoms worsened and her doctors began talking about it possibly being coronavirus.

She questioned it at first, because while she had tight chest pains reported as one of the symptoms of COVID-19, she didn’t have a sore throat or fever. And she certainly didn’t feel as sick as the patients flooding hospitals in other regions.

“You get some anxiousness, because the idea was pretty much, if you get diagnosed you’ll have to go to the hospital,” Patterson said. “Four weeks ago, I think the impression that most people had was if you get COVID you immediately go to the hospital and they put you on a ventilator.”

Getting tested, she found, was an entirely different story. Her doctors referred her first to the Pima County Health Department, which she says wasn’t able to provide a test, then to a private facility near Oro Valley giving tests.

A doctor at the private facility listened perfunctorily to her explanation of symptoms and then told Patterson to go to the emergency room if she was experiencing chest pain because it was probably a heart problem. She left with no test results, but with her own doctors thoroughly convinced she had COVID-19.

Her own struggles obtaining a diagnosis drove home just how difficult it has been to handle the pandemic statewide. Vulnerable populations, such as residents living on the Navajo Nation and Arizonans without reliable medical care, are particularly underserved, Patterson
said.

She considers herself fortunate to have a partner to care for her at home and a physician who supports her wishes to recuperate at home, even agreeing to perform a chest X-ray at her home. But many people don’t have that, Patterson said.

“When we look back on this and it’s time to assess what’s going on by looking at the data and looking at the research, we’ll find that because we weren’t able to have the luxury of a coordinated response, there will be places where we fell short,” she said. “This is the time to be very transparent with our communities, and I don’t know that we are being transparent.”