Coronavirus Catch-up (pt. 1)

Unbelievable.  That's what the past few weeks have been.  I hope this blog survives the decades and can be useful to someone looking for information on this time in history.

On Feb 21, I flew to Rome, Italy for a week.  It was long-planned, and I used all my personal days plus an unpaid day of leave to go.  It was a great week! We had been to Rome before, so this visit, we got to do lots of less-touristy stuff.  Everything was amazing and awesome and so memorable.  Unfortunately, the COVID-19 virus had planted itself in northern Italy and was quickly escalating.  We had registered our visit with the American embassy in Italy and were regularly receiving email updates from the State Department.  I saw this graph (below) on March 11th and it is still astounding to me.

When we got to Italy, there were 17 cases, and when we left a week later, there were well over 800.  ONE WEEK.  A week later and there were 4,000 people infected.

While we were in Rome, people were cautious.  We saw lots of people with masks and using hand sanitizer.  It wasn't a busy time in Rome anyway, and the touristy places we went were busy but not anything like what you'd experience in the summer.  Coronavirus was definitely on people's minds, but we knew we were being careful and diligent with hand-washing, etc. And there weren't any cases in Rome then.

Towards mid-week, friends in the US emailed and texted to let us know that the news coming out of Italy was dire.  We assured them we were fine and taking precautions. On Feb. 26, we got an update that Italy remained at Level 2, and no travel bans were in effect.

Then we got a more seriously worded email from the embassy, discouraging travel to the entire country, whereas before, it was only the northern regions.  Our last day in Rome, Friday the 28th of February, we got an email that the threat level was raised to Level 3, meaning avoid non-essential travel.  

We were leaving the next morning, Saturday, Feb 29, and really, nothing in Rome had changed at all. The CDC, though, raised the threat level to Level 4, and the warnings made my heart race a bit.

We were glad we were leaving that day.  As we were checking out of the hotel, the desk clerks told us to tell people in the US that everything was fine in Rome, that they didn't need to cancel reservations.  Looking back, this just makes me shake my head.  They (just like us now) had no idea what was to come.

We heard from lots of family members and friends who were getting all the bad news about Italy and worried about us.  We got on our flight from Rome to Atlanta and had no trouble at all.  Landing in Atlanta, we saw warnings about Ebola as we passed through customs and passport control.  There was nothing at all about Italy or Coronavirus.  We did get asked if we'd been to China in the past 14 days. Then we flew from Atlanta to DC and were asked no questions. We commented to each other several times how there was no screening whatsoever for symptoms of Coronavirus. (Since I'm writing this two weeks after returning, I can say that as of yesterday, many passengers still were not being screened as they came into the US.)