“Am I not going to die?” The first British Covid patient talks about her horrifying experience

The first Covid-19 patient in the UK talked about how her condition mysterious doctors and almost killed them.

Joan Rogers, 51, estimated that he had the flu in late January, but it turned out to be much worse and was taken to the hospital two weeks later. Report the mirror.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 was thought to be restricted to a small number of people who recently arrived abroad.

In fact, the coronavirus has already spread throughout the population, and only a month later the country was blocked to curb a pandemic.

Joan, a cleaner in Colchester, Essex, still suffers from a serious form of long covid eight months after being identified as the earliest known case of human-to-human transmission in the United Kingdom. Is called.

Joan was taken to the hospital by ambulance on February 15 after her worried partner Richard Shepard called NHS 111 after getting sick in bed for two weeks.

In these very early stages of the pandemic, nine people were quarantined by British public health services-mainly Chinese students and a few who came into contact with infected people at ski resorts in France-and the government is still An outbreak in the UK that I wanted to avoid.

Joan Said to Miller: “I thought I had the flu, so an ambulance came out and I felt a little fraudulent.

“One of the last things I remember was resuscitating, joking with the doctor and saying,’Am I not going to die?'” He said: “It’s not my shift.”

However, just 24 hours later, after being diagnosed with pneumonia, she fell into an induced coma and underwent a tracheostomy. In a tracheostomy, a tube was inserted into the trachea just below the vocal cords.

Doctors had a hard time understanding the cause of such severe pneumonia and could only put Joan on a ventilator and give her body the opportunity to fight a mysterious illness.

However, the virus caused a potentially fatal overreaction of the body’s immune system known as a “cytokine storm.”

Since then, the drug has been shown to help weaken this immune response in Covid-19 patients, but at the time, doctors treating Joan were working blindly.

Lauren, a 20-year-old daughter, said: “Richard came home one day and told me to sit down. He was told it was 50/50. He started crying and said,” I don’t think your mom is going to get it done. I will. “

Joan hasn’t been abroad recently and doesn’t know how he caught the virus.

She did not take the test in the intensive care unit for 17 days. When she finally got an antibody test in June, it confirmed she had the virus.

Professor Francois Balloux of the University College London said:

“It’s very reasonable to believe that this spread in January.

“At that time, no one could have predicted what kind of catastrophe this would be. I’m absolutely convinced that there are quite a few undiagnosed cases.

“It is estimated that there were about 1,400 introductions of Covid-19 in the UK, so unlike other countries in the UK, there were zero patients in so many places that something like zero patients Not really. This made it very difficult to control here. “

Joan had a terrifying dream in a 12-day coma, which continues to this day. She suffers from anxiety, extreme fatigue, and persistent muscle aches, but her sick leave ends this month because Long Covid is not recognized as a disability and is turned down to ensure independent living for the disabled. I did.

This forced her to return to work, but she could only manage two hours a day.

She states: “It is said that every day in the intensive care unit can last for a month,” Lauren added. “My mother had to go back to work, so it’s not getting better. It’s a very vicious cycle.”

To date, the first person known to be infected with the virus in the United Kingdom (known as Patient 1) was a 75-year-old woman from Sally identified in a test sample conducted on February 21. did.