KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ He felt fear. Yes, he did.
As he lay in a bed in April at the University of Kansas Hospital, when COVID-19 latched onto his lungs and made him fight to breathe, when his oxygen level dipped so low it set off an alarm in his hospital room, pastor Daniel L. Freeman I summoned every ounce of energy he could from his weary body and prayed.
I don't want to be on a ventilator. I know you have the power. I know if it's in your will I'm going to be able to bounce back.
He bounced back. Not all the way just yet. He still needs a rest after delivering a sermon to his flock at New Beginning Missionary Baptist in Lansing. He checks his temperature every morning and keeps pulse oximeters at home and church to monitor his oxygen levels.
His life is now pre-COVID and post-COVID as he tracks the number of days he's been out of the hospital _ 66, 67, 68.
He has shared his testimony of survival with his congregation and is willing to share it beyond the church walls to encourage people to get tested.
"I think that people need to understand that the COVID is not a death sentence," said Freeman, 53, who lives in Kansas City, Kansas, and is a chaplain for the KCK fire department and Kansas City, Missouri, police.
That is the type of advice that longtime health advocate Broderick Crawford in Wyandotte County believes people need to tell now, especially in the Black community. He sees fear holding some people back from getting tested, and some believe, still, that the coronavirus is a hoax.
"Because for a long time, and even still, all we hear about, or the majority of what we hear about is those that have died," said Crawford, who grew up in KCK. "The nursing homes, the meatpacking plant ...
"We're hearing doom and gloom and we don't hear enough of people who have tested positive, who are at risk, who have survived."
The pandemic has been disproportionately cruel to Black communities across the country. In Kansas City, 50% of residents testing positive for the coronavirus are Black, yet they only make up about 30% of the population. In Johnson County, where only about 5% are Black, 13% testing positive are Black.
In Wyandotte County, more than two-thirds of the people dying from COVID-19 are Black. And though they are about 23% of the county's population, they account for more than 50% of residents testing positive.
The numbers don't surprise Crawford, who has spent years helping Wyandotte County get healthy, working on issues ranging from youth violence, infectious diseases and access to health care, to healthy eating, exercise and cancer awareness.
He is the president of the NBC Community Development Corp., the community outreach program at the New Bethel Church in KCK and a member of Wyandotte County's Health Equity Task Force.
On Wednesday, the church hosted drive-thru COVID-19 testing in its parking lot, part of church outreach on both sides of the state line to make testing more accessible to Black and Hispanic residents.
Health advocates say it's been tough to get some people to take the coronavirus seriously if they don't know anyone who has had it. That is certainly not the case for Crawford.
His 78-year-old mother. A nephew. Two cousins in Kansas City, and two cousins in Chicago. They've all had it.
And, they all survived.
'I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE COVID'
Crawford's 46-year-old cousin, Anthony Richardson of Kansas City, thought the coronavirus was a joke. He knows people who think that. "I think it's more people that don't believe in it than they are afraid," said Richardson.
"I had a friend of mine, he used to come over to my house with a mask on and I used to tease him about it. He was like, 'Man, this stuff is for real. It's serious man.' I'm like, 'I'm not worried about no coronavirus, bro.'
"And then when it hit me, when it hit me, that's what made me a believer."
He knew something was wrong during the first few days of April.
"I didn't know what it was," said Richardson, who used to run a lawn care service before a car accident disabled him. "But what made me go get tested was I was doing a lot of sleeping. My body was real, real sore. And I would be sleeping for hours at a time. I didn't know what was going on.
"I couldn't taste nothing. I couldn't smell nothing. I had a fever. I was waking up sweating like real bad."
A friend who found him in bed at 4 one Friday afternoon offered to take him to the hospital. A few hours later he was in a bed at KU Hospital where he stayed more than two weeks. Though some COVID-19 survivors are afraid to say publicly that they've had the virus, Richardson isn't one of them.
"I want people to know," he said. "Like when I first got sick and I was in the hospital, I called up everybody I was around and said that I had it and to go get tested. I didn't want to be the type of guy who had it and didn't tell anybody."
There are hundreds of survivors' tales in Wyandotte County alone, where the county health department's COVID-19 data hub showed, on Friday, 1,606 confirmed cases with 76 deaths and 503 recoveries, defined as "patients whose symptoms have subsided," including confirmed and probable cases.
Stories of survival within the Black community are beginning to be told across the country.
In Philadelphia, which has seen Black residents suffer at a higher rate than white residents, survivors are on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sharing their stories as part of a campaign to fight the spread of the disease.
Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf tweeted a series of videos from "real Pennsylvanians with firsthand #COVID19 experience." One featured Kyasha Tyson, a Philadelphia City Hall employee who described how the virus irritated her acid reflux, causing her "severe chest pains for about a week."
In California, the Los Angeles County chapter of the health advocacy group Black Women Rally for Action is interviewing survivors about their illnesses and problems they ran into navigating the health care system. The group is hosting events on Facebook _ "Black Women and Covid-19: Telling Our Own Stories" _ while encouraging people to get tested.
More of those stories need to be told, said Crawford, "to help relieve the burden of uncertainty."
"If I know someone that has successfully recovered, then I can feel better about myself being tested and potentially being positive," he said. "Because just like many years ago when you had the big stigma of HIV, nobody wanted to know if they were positive or not.
"It's that same kind of fear. 'I don't want to have the COVID. I don't want to have the COVID.' So there's a great fear because they are seeing COVID equals death instead of you can recover from COVID."
'DON'T HAVE PEOPLE HUGGIN' AND KISSIN' ON YOU'
His own mother's story of recovery began in April when Beverly Crawford returned home to Kansas City from visiting family in Texas.
"I just had this real bad cough when I came back," said the great-grandmother. "I coughed so bad my daughter just took me to the emergency room ... and that's when they diagnosed me. They also diagnosed me with pneumonia on top of the virus."
She spent 11 days at Saint Luke's Hospital. "I've never been sick like that before," she said.
The loneliness of being isolated from her family because of the hospital's no-visitor policy hurt as much as her ribs from all the coughing. But, she wasn't scared. "I know about diseases," said Crawford. "I raised seven children, and I'm 78 years old, so I know quite a bit about different diseases."
She's recovering at home now and doesn't leave the house except for the occasional grocery run or doctor's appointment. She worries about people her age with underlying health problems, at highest risk for the virus, and tells her story for them. "I'm here," she said. "So I am a total example of the fact that it can be taken care of.
"I think anybody that has gone through this and gotten out of it should be willing to tell somebody else."
Her message is for seniors specifically, to "keep their immune systems healthy and make sure they're doing what (health officials) are telling people to do, which is something they should have been doing all the time, and that's wash your hands, and don't have people huggin' and kissin' on you because you don't know where they have been," she said.
"So the better thing to do right now until this thing is completely settled, is people should be very, very cautious. And I am. I'm very cautious."
Her message to everyone else is simple: Get tested.
"It's better to go and see than not to know. You can't get the help if you don't know. You must take precautions. I waited almost a week after I got back in town. And the only reason I went (to the hospital) then is because my daughter called my doctor and the doctor told her to take me to the hospital.
"You don't want to wait like that. That was ... I'm blessed. I'll put it that way."
CONFUSION HURT TESTING EFFORTS
The point of having survivors tell their stories is to make people feel more comfortable about getting tested. But many people are frustrated.
"The hurdles that I've seen in the community, and this for sure includes the African American community, have been related to confusion about who should get tested, more than anything," said Dr. Kelly Kreisler, the chief medical officer for the KCK safety net clinic Vibrant Health, which ran the recent COVID-19 testing at Crawford's church.
"There's been a lot of change in testing criteria that came down from the CDC. Initially, when there was a lot of interest in getting tested in the community, the medical community, following the advice of the CDC, told people not to get tested if they thought they had it because of lack of available testing.
"So we were telling people, following the national guidelines, stay at home if you think you're sick, and only come in if you're very, very sick.
"So I think that message really stuck with people and also that feeling of 'I called, or my neighbor called, or someone in my church called, and they were told not to get tested.'"
Last month, health officials in Wyandotte County loosened eligibility requirements for testing, making free tests available to people who live or work in the county who might not be showing any symptoms but who might have been exposed to it.
The Unified Government Public Health Department, working with the county's Health Equity Task Force, announced more pop-up testing sites across the county, too.
Working with local churches and community leaders is helping, Kreisler said. Vibrant Health uses group texting and Facebook to let its patients know where testing sites are set up.
"It's very important that people are taking care of themselves and seeking medical care as soon as they need it," said Kreisler. "The sooner you come in for care for any health condition, the more likely that we can treat it appropriately, and we know that people who seek early care do better, and that's true for COVID-19 also."
'BY THE GRACE OF GOD'
Freeman's run-in with COVID-19 _ seven days at KU Hospital where he was treated with hydroxychloroquine and Z-Pak _ left him with more than one Sunday sermon's worth of advice about this disease he calls a "wolf in sheep's clothing."
Pay attention to your body and know when it is "trying to speak to you."
Don't be afraid to get tested _ knowledge is power.
Wear a mask in public. Wash your hands. Use hand sanitizer.
The coronavirus is real and "can hit anybody's house."
"By the grace of God," he said, his wife, Tausha, and their sons, ages 18 and 21, did not get the disease, though they had to quarantine for 14 days after he tested positive.
He doesn't know where he caught the virus. "I went to a church for a banquet, and I was an interim chaplain at KU (Hospital) and I did 12-hour rounds ... so I could have gotten it at either place," he said. "There's speculation and that's all we have."
Like other survivors speaking out, he pushes people to get tested.
He sees it as something people do for others, "your loved ones, your neighbors, church members, the babies, the seniors _ the seasoned people," he said.
"My way of thinking is that even if you don't care enough for yourself to get tested, think about your family. Because if you have a mother who is 65, 70 years old, you're running around with it, you're in her face, now she catches it. It can be a death sentence for her.
"If you have a pregnant wife, a pregnant sister, a pregnant niece, you could risk not only them but also that little baby that the Lord has blessed them with.
"If you have a brother or uncle or anyone who may have ... an underlying medical issue, because you're not going to get tested and you're coming around them, now you're putting them at risk."
He knows that some people are heeding his words. Last week, a member of his church told him that she was running a fever and had chills, and that "it may not be anything," but she wanted him to know.
He told her to call her doctor.
"I think it's because she heard my story and because she experienced it through me, what this virus has the chance of doing to a person, that helped her realize that she should not take this lightly," he said.
