LAND O' LAKES, Fla. — Week after week battling symptoms, with test after test coming back positive, Gene DellaSala says he was becoming desperate.
“When does this end for me,” DellaSala remembered thinking. The father of two was the first person in Pasco County to test positive for COVID-19.
That was on March 11.
DellaSala has been quarantined inside a room of his home ever since, cut off from his wife and daughters. On his YouTube channel where he normally posts tech reviews, he's been sharing his experience recovering from the virus.
His symptoms, he says, persisted for weeks on end. His test results consistently returned positive results. He believes his "Patient Zero" status is why he was so regularly tested and received the attention he did from local health officials.
His doctor prescribed him hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, an antibiotic, about two weeks ago.
The initial side effects were unpleasant, he said, kicking in about four hours after taking his first dose as he was helping his daughter with math homework over FaceTime.
“I started feeling a lot of sweat—my hands were sweating, my whole body was sweating—and I wasn’t even doing anything stressful,” he said. “I started—not getting an arrhythmia or anything—getting anxiety and a headache and I was concerned about that.”
Doctors have previously warned the drug could lead to irregularities in the electrical rhythms of the heart and prove fatal.
A small study in Brazil involving high doses of chloroquine, which is related to hydroxychloroquine had to be stopped early after a group of COVID patients developed dangerous heart rhythm issues, the New York Times first reported on Monday.
To be safe, DellaSala says he proceeded with a lower dose, about 200 milligrams, of hydroxychloroquine. Within the next few days side effects lessened along with his symptoms.
He was tested yet again for COVID-19 last week.
Negative.
“I have theories,” he said when asked if he believed it was because of the drug, which is more commonly used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
“It took me over 30 days and I was still testing positive and then all of a sudden I started taking these two drugs and it knocked the viral load down low enough to test negative.”
DellaSala wouldn’t endorse the drug for every coronavirus patient. He wishes he could’ve been monitored more closely by his doctors.
“I didn’t have any way to monitor what was going on with me other than just taking my own pulse, my own body temperature and just seeing how I felt,” he said.
“What happened with me definitely has no scientific rigor.”
Clinical trials are currently underway on the drug. The Food and Drug Administration has signed off on allowing doctors to use hydroxychloroquine to treat severely ill coronavirus patients. The agency has not, however, signed off on it as a safe or effective treatment for coronavirus patients.
Some early studies in China and France initially concluding the drug could help were later found to be flawed. A more recent Chinese study showed promise but was done on too small a scale to produce any definitive conclusions.
RELATED: Florida to receive more shipments of malaria drug despite unproven record to treat coronavirus
President Trump has repeatedly touted the unproven drug as a potential treatment. Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the state has secured a shipment of a million doses of the drug from India.
DellaSala says he’s hopeful another test taken Monday will return the second consecutive negative result he says he needs in order to feel comfortable being around his family again.
“I know it’s hard to get these tests but if you want to avoid spreading this and you want to keep everybody healthy I think it’s important we all get tested, especially after you had symptoms like I did,” he said.
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