Tech Republic Publishes “Surviving COVID-19: Lessons learned by a tech CEO”

edgeTI CEO who contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic shares further thoughts on communications, customers, and family.

by Todd R. Weiss in CXO on June 16, 2020, 12:42 PM PST

COVID-19 has so far killed 116,250 people in the US and 437,939 people around the world as the coronavirus pandemic rages on without a vaccine. More than 2.1 million cases of the disease have been confirmed around the world. According to a COVID-19 online tracking dashboard, built and maintained by Johns Hopkins University.

One survivor, Jim Barrett, CEO for edgeTI, a data visualization and analysis company in Arlington, VA., was one of the lucky ones. Barrett got the disease in mid-March and lived to tell his story about what the ordeal was like.

Barrett said he was infected with the virus during the week of March 1 while he was on a work trip to San Francisco to meet with clients. He had joined edgeTI as the chief operating officer in 2017 and was named as CEO on January 1, 2020.

His exposure to the coronavirus came just before states around the nation began stay-at-home orders to try to get the pandemic under control.

Barrett began feeling sick on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, when he started showing what he would soon learn were classic symptoms of COVID-19. Symptoms being a bad headache, a cough, shallow breathing, a loss of his sense of smell, and a fever for several days.

“It all happened at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so you could not really get tested and there wasn’t clear information about what to do,” said Barrett. He was tested at his doctor’s office on March 19 for the disease, but the results didn’t arrive for seven days, confirming that he had been infected with the virus.

By the time he received the test results, he was already feeling 90 % better, he said. From the first onslaught of symptoms until his eventual recovery, it was about 10 days.

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