A single act of generosity led to COVID-19 fatally spreading through this New Jersey household

ELMWOOD PARK, N.J. – It took only a single act of generosity to undo months of Sofia Burke’s caution on the job.

Sofia is a nurse. She took care of COVID-19 patients through the pandemic’s first wave in New Jersey. She inserted intravenous lines, pushed fluids, held some patients as they died and helped others to survive at the nursing home where she works.

Above all, she followed safety protocols – neither she nor any member of her family became sick.

But in November, COVID-19 spread into the Elmwood Park, New Jersey, home that Sofia shares with seven other family members. After Sofia’s mother gave a car ride to an elderly friend with a cough, she became infected. And from her, the infection spread.

By Thanksgiving, all eight members of Sofia’s household had become sick, all but the last testing positive for the coronavirus.

Her father died of the virus. Her mother, discharged after six days, still needs supplemental oxygen for the slightest exertion. Every other member of the family – Sofia’s brother, her husband, and her three children, ages 2, 6 and 20 – is recovering from or coping with the aftereffects of COVID-19.

And Sofia herself, who had been so careful for so long on the job, remains in the hospital with the virus.

Alone on Thanksgiving weekend in a negative-pressure room on the ninth floor of Hackensack University Medical Center, however, Sofia mostly wanted to express her gratitude.

“I want to say thank you to this hospital for everything they have done for me and my family,” she said via phone, the lower half of her face encased in an oxygen mask. “I want to say thank you to all the front-line people working so hard.”

Researchers have documented several cases in which COVID-19 spread to multiple members of the same family, usually at family gatherings where most did not wear masks.

In the early days of the pandemic in New Jersey, five members of the Fusco family in Freehold, New Jersey – the matriarch, three of her children and her sister – died, and 19 others became infected. Families in North Carolina, Texas, Missouri and Los Angeles each have reported eight or more members testing positive and some dying.

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In a five-page guidance bulletin “for large or extended families living in the same household,” the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stressed that if a household includes relatives older than 65 or people with underlying medical conditions, all members should act as if they themselves are at higher risk of severe illness from the virus.

“This can be difficult if space is limited,” the agency acknowledged.

Sofia can relate.

“We tried to wear masks in the house and did everything we could to keep my father safe,” Sofia said of the 93-year-old she had nursed back from triple bypass surgery more than a decade ago. Her mother quarantined in her room with her son, but both became sick.

“This virus is so transmissible,” said Brian Burke, Sofia's husband.

At 43, Brian had a comparatively mild case that nonetheless caused waves of fever and fatigue for a week, back pain from the infection in his lungs and concerns about clotting as bruises appeared beneath his skin.

“It’s no joke,” he said.

Dora Matias, 66, Sofia’s mother, was the first to be hospitalized. Anthony, her 29-year-old son from a second marriage, managed to ride it out at home, with steroids and breathing treatments. But on the day Dora came home from the hospital, Sofia’s father, Otto Bowless, was admitted with breathing difficulties.