In July 2020, the summer seemed to be without a floor. When Keisha Lance Bottoms revealed that she and her husband Derek had both tested positive for COVID-19, the political dispute briefly came to a halt. Atlanta was already well into the pandemic, with its mayor at the center of a highly visible standoff with state officials over mask mandates and public health regulations. Unlike a private family, the news was received in a different way. The mayor was her. She had been advocating for mask use on television. The virus was now present in her own house.
At the time of the announcement, Keisha did not report any symptoms. Derek’s experience was completely different. He lost about 20 pounds in a single week, which seems almost unbelievable when you take into account what severe COVID actually does to the body and how it can consume a person from the inside out while the outside world is still debating whether the threat is real. It seemed that his level of exhaustion was higher than what a restful night’s sleep could provide. For a brief while, it appeared as though the worst was behind the family as they recovered from that initial phase.
It wasn’t. Derek was still experiencing crippling headaches every morning by September 2020, almost two months after the initial diagnosis. In an almost casual post, Keisha revealed that her husband had begun his day with an MRI appointment, which was set up especially to look into the ongoing neurological symptoms that would not go away. It’s worth taking a moment to consider this picture: the mayor of a large American city overseeing a public health emergency from City Hall, while her husband is in a scanning machine across town attempting to figure out why his head hurts two months after the virus is said to have cleared.
In the fall of 2020, there was still no clear term for what Derek Bottoms was going through. Although the phrase “long COVID” was used in patient communities and online forums by people who described exhaustion, mental fog, and symptoms that persisted for months, it had not yet gained traction in popular medical or political discourse. Looking back, his case uncomfortably fits that pattern: the acute illness goes away, but the aftermath doesn’t. There’s a feeling that his experience would have gone unnoticed, as so many similar cases did at the time, if his wife hadn’t been a public figure forced to divulge information to a city that was keeping a close eye on her.
At that time, Atlanta was a very tense city. As the number of cases increased, Mayor Bottoms and Governor Brian Kemp engaged in a heated and public dispute over local mask regulations, which resulted in press conferences and legal threats. Her husband’s protracted illness and her own COVID diagnosis gave that argument more weight than it might have had in the abstract. Around the same time, she also lost her grandfather to the virus, a fact that was briefly discussed in the media before being mostly forgotten, as grief often gets lost in the news cycle during a protracted crisis.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that while the policy discussions surrounding Derek dominated the discourse, his story was covered, acknowledged, and then mainly forgotten. Millions of people nationwide experienced the long-term effects of a virus that the loudest voices continued to maintain was no more serious than a bad case of the flu. In between MRI appointments and public remarks, families such as the Bottoms household were quietly living the rebuttal in real time. Derek seems to have recovered over time, regardless of what the scans revealed—no specific results were disclosed. However, the event made a lasting impression on the public record.