Editor’s note: The COVID-19 pandemic created a multi-year disruption in the everyday lives of people around the globe. When the pandemic hit the United States in early 2020, few people could imagine the fallout — illnesses and deaths, business and school closings, overcrowded hospitals and “stay at home” orders from local, state and federal government leaders were shocking.

Five years later, we as a community, state and nation are a changed society.

Mirror reporters have embarked on a series of articles that in some aspects recounts those first few weeks and months and in other cases takes a look at what has changed due to the pandemic. The first in this series features those who experienced the disease first hand and who reached out to the Mirror to share their stories.

Steve Stefanon sits in his Llyswen home. Stefanon credits his lifestyle as a vitamin taker who led an active life with saving his life when he contracted COVID-19. Mirror photo by Patrick Waksmunski

Harry Weddle of Bellwood takes pride in something few would envy him for — he was the first Blair County resident to be hospitalized for COVID-19, and the first to leave the hospital alive.

“He thinks he’s a celebrity,” said his daughter, Julie White of Pinecroft.

Weddle was taken by ambulance to UPMC Altoona three times in March 2020, being admitted for a couple days the second time, then for a month, starting March 26.

During that entire month, Weddle was in isolation, and his family couldn’t see or touch him.

“It was consuming our lives, but we were not a part of it,” White said. “It was just weird.”

Frenchville native Dawn Winters got COVID-19 during a business trip to San Francisco in 2023, and she ended up losing that job due to the debilitating effects of long COVID. Courtesy photo

While the experience may have conferred a kind of celebrity status onto Weddle, it didn’t gift him with celebrity looks.

“I was all swelled up and blue and bleeding from my eyes,” Weddle said, relating what a hospital chaplain told him at the end of that month, when he was about to be taken to Select Specialty Rehabilitation Hospital in Johnstown to start his recovery.

When he got to Select Specialty, he had scabs all over his face, head and ears, according to a nurse there, he said.

He couldn’t get his fingers through his hair, Weddle said.

The breathing apparatus he wore so long “reshaped his face,” White said, and left a circular indentation clearly visible even now — five years later.

Frenchville native Wendy Dillen had been admitted with double pneumonia and complete respiratory failure in late July 2020. “I’m amazed I made it through,” she said. Courtesy photo

When UPMC first put him on a ventilator, family members thought that would be for three days only. But Weddle was on a vent for three weeks.

White said the staff took care of her father and were “phenomenal.”

Staff, including Director of Pastoral Care Tony Conrad, became “family,” and their only connection with her father, White said.

“They were our eyes and ears,” she said, noting the family was in touch with staff three or four times a day.

Conrad would go every day to pray with him, then call her and tell her how he was doing, Weddle’s wife, Sandy, said.

Anna Smith of Hollidaysburg sits in her home. Since contracting COVID-19, Smith has “lost a lot of (her) pep.” Mirror photo by William Kibler

Once, Conrad was holding her husband’s hand, and her husband wouldn’t let it go, even though he was unconscious or semi-conscious, Sandy said.

The family made a country music playlist and the staff played it next to her father’s head, White said.

At rehab, Weddle needed to learn again how to swallow, walk and talk.

Relearning how to swallow was hardest, he said.

In Johnstown, he was able to see his family from out of a window, which made him cry.

There were setbacks along the way to recovery. He had trips back to the hospital, including once for a suspected stroke and once after he stopped breathing for a time.

He finally returned home June 13, more than two months after being hospitalized.

His survival is a miracle, his family said, not only because he was the first person hospitalized in Blair County, when not a lot was known about the disease and how to treat it, but because Weddle had pre-existing medical issues.

He has diabetes, has been on dialysis for eight years, has had three heart attacks and five stents and he uses a colostomy bag, due to the removal of his colon.

Despite COVID being “some ordeal,” he remains active, including going on a cruise and going to the lake twice a year.

He also has returned to church and finds himself appreciating things more.

He was raised Catholic, but was never especially religious, he said, noting “I got away from it.” But the day after they said he was well enough to go from Select Specialty to HealthSouth, he told Sandy he would start going to church with her.

The couple, who have been married for 57 years, now attend Tipton Baptist.

“We’ve made quite the life,” Sandy said.

As for Weddle and his experience with COVID?

“I came out alive,”

Weddle said. “That was real good.”

Index card of memories

Doug and Jo Ellen Mingle also survived COVID, but nearly two dozen of their friends and neighbors weren’t as fortunate.

The Mingles, owners of the Roaring Spring True Value, took COVID seriously, even if some of their friends and customers did not.

“There were a lot of people around us who thought it was a hoax,” Jo Ellen said. “Or at least didn’t take it seriously,” Doug said. “Or at least thought it was something they didn’t need to protect themselves from,” Jo Ellen said.

Jo Ellen carries an index card around with her that denies what the deniers may believe: on it are 34 names of people she knew who died of the virus.

“I consider it evidence,” she said.

“They’re also part of our hearts,” Doug said.

As their business was deemed “essential,” they remained open to the public.

The couple tried to protect themselves and their staff as much as possible, placing hand sanitizer stations around, installing barriers, trying to be careful, taking more email and phone orders and preparing those orders ahead of time and taking them to cars in the parking lot.

“Everybody got a little bit creative,” Doug said.

Some customers weren’t having it and would walk up to workers nose-to-nose, or would walk around more than it seemed necessary, looking at merchandise displays, or would have their masks hanging off one ear, Jo Ellen said.

Jo Ellen would cut lots of fabric for people who were making masks, and she had to use blue painters tape to mark a perimeter so that customers would keep their distance, she said.

“They wanted to be at my elbow,” she said.

Some of the staff “thought we went overboard,” Doug said.

As store owners, they felt responsible to protect everyone involved, they said.

Many people who didn’t take the restrictions well seemed to be bothered by how unnatural it all was, Doug agreed.

Later, after restrictions were relaxed, Jo Ellen was at a department store near Altoona and found herself luxuriating in the feel of walking around unimpeded.

It made her realize what many of her customers had probably felt at her store, she said.

Despite all their precautions, the couple came down with COVID in November of 2020, as did almost their entire staff.

Both Mingles got vaccinated, when vaccines became available, and boosters, too.

Jo Ellen then got COVID a second time, after being vaccinated.

People cited that as evidence that the vaccine didn’t do any good, she said.

“That’s when I got the card out,” she said. “I didn’t die.”

Life forever altered

For Marie Little and her husband, John, of Hollidaysburg, it began with oyster stew, a Christmas tradition for them.

“Is this the same recipe?” John asked Marie, mentioning that the stew seemed a bit off.

The recipe was the same, she said, and when she told John’s brother Pat about that, he said he didn’t like the sound of it — because COVID can alter the sense of taste.

It turned out that both Marie and John had COVID when they got tested after the 2020 holidays.

After that, things were never the same.

Both went to UPMC Altoona; Marie first, John a week later.

She was in the hospital about 30 days, then at HealthSouth for 2½ more weeks.

John, who had Parkinson’s, got out of the hospital before her, but had to go to a nursing facility, where he remained even after she got home.

“I didn’t see him for almost three months,” she said, adding that John got home in mid-March 2021.

COVID exacerbated John’s Parkinson’s symptoms, Little said.

After COVID, he had manual dexterity and mobility problems and often fell, although his time as a high school wrestler allowed him to avoid injury when that happened.

He worked with the George Ferris neuro center in Altoona, saw a neurologist in Pittsburgh and got help from the Van Zandt VA Medical Center, and he exercised and did his best to be independent, but he never reached his pre-COVID baseline afterward.

The couple continued with social activities, but they could no longer ride bikes, and he couldn’t fly fish, she said.

“We made the best of it,” she said. “(But) the quality of life changed when COVID hit this house.”

Little said her own COVID survival story is remarkable, and she believes she lived through it so that she could be there “to take care of John,” who died after a stroke in February 2024.

“I do think it was a miracle,” she said, as there was no real medical explanation for her survival.

When she was hospitalized, her oxygen levels were dangerously low, but she refused to go on a ventilator, believing that many people don’t survive it.

She instead got oxygen from a cannula, in high amounts — but not enough to keep her thinking clearly, she said, stating that she would hear doctors talk about her condition and then forget what they said. She also talked to friends and relatives on the phone, but didn’t remember the conversations.

The turning point in her fight to survive came as the hospital was planning to send her to a speciality hospital with equipment to provide a higher oxygen rate without a ventilator. It was a move she didn’t want to make.

Little was already at the maximum oxygen volume that UPMC Altoona could provide via cannula — 50 liters per minute, she said.

People were praying for her, including a cousin who had started a prayer chain, and she was praying herself.

The next morning, her condition had improved so much that she only needed 4 liters of oxygen per minute, she said.

That meant she qualified to go to HealthSouth, the local rehab hospital.

A religious man, the doctor attributed her recovery to God.

She eventually was shown a scan representing her lung capacity — there was only a speck of white, representing functioning lung, with the rest all black.

“One teeny tiny white space,” she said. “I technically on paper shouldn’t have made it.”

‘Strong individual’

Steve Stefanon of Llyswen was neither a smoker nor a drinker, but rather a vitamin taker who led an active life that included lots of outdoor work as a landscaper.

That combination may have saved his life after he contracted COVID-19, which led to virtually all systems failing, Stefanon, now 77, believes.

He got sick in August 2020 and was back to work for his landscaping company by November.

In between, he was on a ventilator at UPMC Altoona, at Select Speciality Rehabilitation Hospital in Johnstown and at his daughter Stephanie Roefaro’s house.

He had to relearn how to walk and eat, had to take dialysis until his kidneys recovered and had to work back into urination on his own.

His first actual lunch with regular food was toasted cheese and tomato soup.

“It was delectable,” Stefanon said.

At one point in Johns­town, a medical professional predicted he would never live a normal life.

Yet another doctor there told him that he “must be one strong individual to come as far as you did.”

“That made me feel good,” he said.

His kidney doctor said that of six other patients who had encountered similar medical problems, Stefanon was the only one who survived.

But even after he returned to his own house, things weren’t easy.

It seemed to take forever to get his strength back, but he pushed hard, he said.

He would think, “I want to live but I didn’t care if I died,” he said.

Then, in the spring of 2021, he was working at the house of a retired nurse whom he’d never met. She came onto her porch and revealed that she had helped take care of him in the ICU.

“Do you realize what a miracle you are?” she asked him.

A religious experience

For Janice Goodman of Alexandria, now 83, COVID-19 turned out to be a religious experience.

She had gone to Penn Highlands Huntingdon with sweats, chills and breathing difficulties and had been there for days with double pneumonia and believed — “I knew” — that she was dying of the virus, she wrote to the Mirror.

“Yet with all this understanding, I was in complete peace,” she wrote.

She shared those thoughts with her husband, who asked, “‘Do you realize how many people are praying for you?'” she said in a phone interview.

There were hundreds, including family, friends and members of their church, First Church of Christ on Juniata Gap Road, she wrote.

Then she prayed on her own account, telling God: “You said ask and believe. I’m asking and I believe,” she said.

The next day, she went by medical helicopter to Penn Highlands DuBois, which was better equipped to care for her.

There, she recovered, with help from a doctor who had her lying on her stomach, with her hands above her head, for several weeks.

“I believe he got that information from the Great Physician,” Goodman wrote.

Later, her lung doctor in Altoona told her that based on medical imaging her lungs are clear, in contrast to other COVID-19 patients, most of whose lungs have the appearance of broken glass, she said.

“Our Lord was with me the whole time,” she said.

Life-altering effects

Frenchville native Dawn Winters got COVID-19 during a business trip to San Francisco in 2023, and she ended up losing that job due to the debilitating effects of long COVID.

A year and a half after that West Coast trip, Winters is still struggling, although she has helped herself with online research, an effort undertaken to supplement a lack of knowledge among practitioners about long COVID, which will likely take years for the medical community to figure out, she said.

At first, there were few symptoms, other than feeling a bit lethargic and “down,” she said.

But then she developed Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, an autoimmune histamine — or allergic-type response.

MCAS causes “intense episodes of swelling, shortness of breath, hives, diarrhea, vomiting and other symptoms,” according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Sometimes her heart rate soars to as high as 128 beats per minute, even in her sleep, as indicated by her Apple watch, which rouses her when it happens.

That sort of thing “wears your heart out,” she said.

As a child, she was allergic to bee stings, and a mosquito bite once caused her neck to swell. She’s also sensitive to mold. Still, she doesn’t think that those former allergic reactions are related to her apparent allergic responses triggered by COVID.

She has been treated by three medical systems in the region, with mixed success.

She herself has found some relief with an anxiety medication prescribed for her prior to contracting COVID.

She had some of it left, saw that it was an antihistamine and figured it might work to counteract the allergic-type reactions she was having.

A new medical provider she’s been seeing OK’d it, she said.

Some days are good, some days not so much.

“I’m doing my darndest to be the person I want to be,” said Winters, who’s now 45.

She wants to be smart, caring and loving, but the fatigue and the brain fog — and the frustration they cause — make that difficult, she said.

“It gets me in my feels,” she said. “I sit and I weep.”

Her daughter, now 19, has also been debilitated by long COVID in the form of Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS.

It causes her heart rate to drop when she stands, causing her to feel faint.

She’s on heart medication and may need to be on it for the rest of her life.

A college student, she has a handicap placard on her car.

“That hurts my heart,” Winters said.

‘Amazed I made it’

COVID-19 nearly taxed Frenchville native Wendy Dillen to death.

It was late July 2020, just after that year’s extended tax season for Dillen, now 59, who had gone from working up to 90 hours a week preparing IRS returns for clients, to 60 hours — because quarterly reports still needed to be done.

Dillen would have been tired anyway, due to her schedule, but this was extra as she was unable to concentrate to the point of not driving to work that Thursday and Friday.

Her boss told her to take the first two days of the following week off, and she made a doctor’s appointment for 2:30 p.m. Monday.

That morning, her daughter helped her get ready, but Dillen was feeling so low, she asked to go to the hospital right away.

“I said I didn’t think I would make it until 2:30,” she recalls.

She was probably right.

She could barely walk and was gasping for air.

“I was literally turning blue,” she said.

In the UPMC Altoona emergency room, a nurse took her back, and based on how she looked, called for a pulse-oxygen device, which Dillen later found out registered 32%.

The norm is between 95 and 100.

They immediately put her on a stretcher and announced they needed to intubate.

“We have to do this or you’re going to die,” they said.

“I was freaking out,” she said.

They knocked her out with a sedative and she woke up 21 days later.

In the interim, her daughter gave permission for treatment with “convalescent plasma,” which contains antibodies from people who had recovered from COVID-19.

Medical providers told her it probably saved her life, as she had been admitted with double pneumonia and complete respiratory failure.

She might have gone to the emergency room earlier, but didn’t have health insurance, she said.

The ordeal left her with pain in her right arm and weakness in the legs, and her voice is more hoarse than it used to be, probably because of the trach tube.

At rehab in Johnstown, the nurses admired her fight.

Dillen figured she was “too young to be miserable and die,” she said, while her two children said she was just too stubborn to do that.

“I’m amazed I made it through,” she said. “Anybody who wants to say it’s not real is completely wrong.”

‘Lost my pep’

COVID-19 got Anna Smith of Hollidaysburg twice: first, via an attempt to avoid it; next, via the disease itself.

Smith, now 82, got vaccinated in March, April and November of 2021 and in late May 2022.

Shortly after that, in early June, she was at a birthday party when she was stricken with aching in every joint, she said.

She consulted a State College neurologist, who ordered an MRI and determined that she had neuropathy, which he attributed to a reaction to the vaccine.

Before that, she’d been healthy, she said.

The neuropathy has led to her legs going to sleep while she is standing in church and to her hands going to sleep. It has also caused her knees to hurt and her feet to feel cold almost all the time, she said.

Her general health has also declined, she said, noting she had to stop taking some medications because they upset her stomach.

She has arthritis, which may also stem from the vaccine, she said.

Aggravating her case further was a bout of COVID in December.

It caused her to feel yucky — a feeling that hasn’t really left her, she said.

Since contracting COVID, “I’ve lost a lot of my pep,” she added.

Faith a sustaining anchor

Nancy Weichel, 64, a now-retired corrections officer originally from East Freedom, caught COVID-19 in November 2020, probably at work, where it ran rampant in the early days of the pandemic, she said.

At first, it was only a headache, but the virus rapidly progressed over the course of a week, prompting Weichel to go to Encompass Health.

When she arrived at the Altoona facility, doctors found her lung function critically low and placed her on a ventilator to save her life.

It was a brush with death, Weichel said.

“When I was intubated for two weeks, they thought I was going to die,” Weichel said. “I didn’t want to leave, and apparently (God) wasn’t ready for me yet and sent me back.”

Weichel remained in the hospital until January 2021, when her lung function improved enough for her to return home.

It wasn’t an easy road to recovery.

The coronavirus caused her kidney function to decline to the point she needed dialysis treatments until her kidneys improved. She also lost more than 60 pounds and used a wheelchair.

“I couldn’t walk or lift anything over one pound,” Weichel said. “I had to start all over again, I was like a child.”

Weichel credits her care team at both Encompass and UPMC as her “guardian angels,” who saw her through the worst of her condition. She also credits her family and friends for their support and prayers.

Weichel, who has been a long time volunteer at the Altoona Food Bank, steadily regained her strength throughout the remainder of 2021 and has since redoubled her volunteer efforts.

“My life changed,” she said, adding she feels grateful to be alive.

Now, more grounded in her faith and with her restored health, Weichel said she has a new attitude on life.

“I thank the Lord for everything,” Weichel said.