Tested by COVID

23 days. Nearly 100 health care workers. Here’s what it took to save one patient at Texas Health Dallas. Dr. Otto J. Marquez knew something was wrong the minute he saw the patient in the emergency room at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. The 63-year-old man had come in five days earlier complaining of headache, sore throat, fatigue and lack of appetite. He had been isolating at home while he waited on the results of his COVID-19 test. But as his flulike symptoms progressed into trouble breathing, his wife brought him to Marquez’s ER. This was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic reaching Dallas, and the virus was just beginning to change daily life. Dallas County on March 20 reported fewer than 100 cases of COVID-19, and two days later, the county ordered its residents to shelter in place. By late July, the U.S. would count more than 147,000 deaths, including over 500 in Dallas County.

And the numbers continue to rise