They went to Italy for Valentine’s Day. Then she got sick. But was it coronavirus?
Tuesday was Italy’s first day under a nationwide lockdown after the government restricted all travel within the country.
But barely a month ago, when Dorothy and Dave Hunt set off from Charlotte on their Valentine’s Day trip to the northeast Italian city of Venice, they had museums and walking tours and gondola rides on their minds — not Covid-19. After all, though the virus was well on its way to wreaking havoc in China at that point, the rest of the world was largely still on the outside of the outbreak looking in.
“We thought about it,” says Dorothy Hunt, who lives about 20 miles from uptown. “But there was no indication or anything of it. Right before we left, there were no signs at all of it in Italy. And I have to say, it was sort of a Western hubris where we thought, It’s not gonna happen in a country like Italy.”
One morning midway through their vacation, however, Hunt says they walked past a newsstand and saw on the front page of a newspaper that the first suspected case of the novel coronavirus had been reported in Venice.
On Feb. 16, they arrived back at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport by way of Paris, spent the night with friends, and then drove home to their Charlotte suburb the next day. For a week, Dorothy Hunt felt completely fine. The following weekend, she says, she and Dave attended a large party and a sports tournament, at both coming into contact with “tons of people.”
Then late that Sunday afternoon, she found herself feeling unusually run down, and soon after, she started developing a cough. By the next morning, she had a low-grade fever.
Since she works almost exclusively from home as a consultant, she already would have been in for the day, so she took the day off and rested. She called her doctor’s office the next morning — on Tuesday, Feb. 25.
This is Dorothy Hunt’s account of her experience in the two weeks since picking up the phone to make that call, in her own words, as told to The Charlotte Observer (with portions edited for clarity and brevity).
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By then, the news had hit that Venice was one of the spots that had reported several cases, and that northern Italy was going under quarantine. So I very specifically said to the receptionist, “My husband and I have just come back from Venice. I am showing symptoms that I think could be coronavirus. I’m a little concerned. We both attended huge events over the weekend. I’m worried about how many people we may have exposed, if we have it. I really want to get tested.”
And it was truly one of those bless-her-heart moments that you get down here sometimes: She said, “Oh, come on in to the office.” And I stopped and I said, “You want me to come in to your office?? Did I mention that I think I might have coronavirus?” I mean, I literally had to tell her like three times, “I think I have coronavirus. You don’t want me to come into your office. You’ve gotta be kidding me.” I thought, There’s no way that office is equipped to deal with somebody who should possibly be in isolation. So she said, “Let me check with the nurse manager.”
The nurse manager got on the phone and said, “Yeah, we don’t want you to come in the office. Let me make a few calls, and I’ll call you back.” About two hours later, she called back and said she had called the head of the epidemiology department, who told her that Venice was not on the list that the CDC was concerned with testing at this time, and that I should self-quarantine for at least two weeks.” So I said, “Okey-dokey, fine. I can do that. I can work from home.” And I went on Amazon Fresh and ordered a giant batch of groceries.
I managed to more or less function for the next few days. I was sick, but not deathly ill.
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Toward the end of that week, I started to feel better. The fever had subsided, the aches and pains had subsided, and I was thinking I was over the hurdle. And then I get a call from the office manager at the doctor’s office again and she said, “The CDC just added Venice to the list. You should probably get tested now. You need to go to the ER.” And I asked her, “Alright, are you gonna call the ER and tell them I’m coming, so that they can be prepared? They should maybe have at least masks waiting when we pull up to the door, so that we don’t contaminate other people.” And she said, “You can give them a call if you want and let them know you’re coming, but no, we don’t do that.”
Well, one of our neighbors is a nurse at the local ER, so I sent him a message. I said, “This seems a little fishy to me. I don’t want to just show up at the ER and get everybody sick.” He called me and said, “Don’t even bother coming. There’s nothing we can do for you. Your fever’s not high enough. You’re not having respiratory issues. If we tested you, we’d have to put you in isolation probably for 24 or 48 hours until the test results got back from Atlanta. And you’d just be getting sicker from all the other stuff here. You’re better off just staying home.”
This was sort of a shocking answer — especially in light of the fact that we had been to two big events the prior week, and I was still worried about possibly having been exposed to so many other people. But we followed his advice.
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My husband and I have both been staying in the house, which is tough for him, because he’s an Uber driver, so we’re out his income. He has been a little symptomatic — he’s been achy and tired and sniffly with a mild sore throat, but he hasn’t developed a fever. That’s honestly pretty normal for him during allergy season.
It’s not uncommon for me to not leave the house for three or four days in a row anyway because I work from home and we’re usually mostly here in the evenings normally. But my husband is starting to go a little nuts. I might have to sedate him.
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Last week, I started feeling worse again. Even though I could have worked from home, I took three of the five days as sick days. My fever hovered under 100. So I rested and spent as much time as I could recovering. It was a “thank-God-for-Netflix” kind of week.
The fever finally broke this past Sunday morning. So I called the doctor this morning and said, “The symptoms have started to alleviate. How long should I continue to self-quarantine once symptoms stop?” And I was told, “Oh, you only have to self-quarantine for the two weeks after you got back.” I said, “Are you sure? That doesn’t make any sense.” I mean, it can’t possibly be right that I should have been able to go out last week — March 2 would have marked 14 full days since our return — when I could barely get out of bed because my symptoms were so bad.
No one is sharing good information. And this is what’s gonna bite us in the bottom, frankly. It’s just alarming.
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Although initially I may have thought I had coronavirus, I actually don’t think I was sick enough to have it. But I work in compliance and ethics, and I’m a super-freak about doing the right thing. And when I think of the maybe 200 people I came into contact with at those two events two weeks ago — one of whom was eight months pregnant — it’s frightening. I kept thinking, What if somebody gets sick from this? I feel like they should know. And so, for instance, I called that pregnant woman.
I don’t know. I just feel like the CDC should be tracking the people we had contact with, at the very least. That’s definitely kept me awake at night, thinking, OK, I hugged this one friend, who goes to visit this other friend regularly. This other friend is recovering from cancer. S---. I could have just killed this other friend.
I mean, it could have been flu. I tend to get colds and sniffles pretty often. I used to get walking pneumonia every year from allergies. So it could be anything. Given what’s going on, I was trying to be proactive. But Dave and I, we could have been patient zeros for this area, and nobody seems to be moderately concerned about that. It would be one thing if I knew for sure I didn’t have it. I’d be like, Fine, I’ll go out right now. But I don’t want to bump into one of my neighbors and kill them just by walking past them.
Anyway, we’re probably going to continue to self-quarantine for the rest of the week and hope that the rest of the symptoms just go away. Maybe it’s just hay fever.
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(A final note: Dorothy and Dave Hunt have still not been tested for Covid-19. “If tests become readily available,” she says, “I’ll get one. Right now, I’m given to understand the ER ... is only testing critically ill patients, and I don’t want us to take a test out of the hands of someone who may need care more urgently than we do.”)
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 4:26 PM.
