Dale and Sherry Grizzle, an elderly couple from Georgia, took a dream cruise in the Pacific, but it turned into a nightmare.
They happened to be aboard the Diamond Princess, which had hundreds of passengers come down with the coronavirus. The couple was brought on land in Japan, where Dale stayed for quarantine. Sherry was among the passengers brought to Washington state, where she remained for three weeks — the longest they’ve been apart in decades.
They said being separated was the worst part about being stricken with the illness.
‘We’ve never been apart like this before, and it was pretty stressful. That may have been the worst part of the whole deal,’ Dale Grizzle, 69, told Fox & Friends Weekend on Sunday.
Sherry said her symptoms initially resembled a common cold.
“When I first started having symptoms, it was just a mild sore throat and a headache and that lasted for several days. … I didn’t think anything of it, but Dale had already been diagnosed so I began to wonder if maybe I had the virus also,” Sherry said.
Dale, 69, said: “I ran a fever for about two and a half weeks that I couldn’t seem to get rid of, and I developed some pneumonia, a milder case of pneumonia, but pneumonia nonetheless, and it was stubborn, but thankfully it didn’t turn into a real bad case so I was able to overcome it.”
Both are fully recovered.
“I couldn’t have asked for any better care. The team of doctors and nurses that took care of me were absolutely awesome, and I can never thank them enough for the care that I received,” Dale said.
Their story mirrors that of others who have contracted then recovered from the fast-spreading virus. For most people, COVID-19 brings only mild symptoms, like a dry cough, fever and headache.
Carl Goldman, 67, and his wife were also aboard the Diamond Princess.
On Day 16, while the ship was docked in Hong Kong, a passenger was diagnosed with a new infection spreading in China — the coronavirus. The captain doubled the ship’s speed and raced back to Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3, entering port a day earlier than planned.
“When we sat down to take off I dozed off, it was the middle of the night, [I] woke up two hours later with a very heavy fever. It was over 103,” Goldman told “Fox & Friends” earlier this month. “There was a doctor on board the plane. He put us in a quarantine area and we flew on to Travis Air Force base.”
Goldman, who appeared on the Fox show via Skype from the quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said he was more vulnerable to the virus because of a pre-existing health condition.
“I had a precondition called Guillain-Barré syndrome and I think that’s why they put me in the biocontainment to make sure that I was stable and that the virus did not go into my lungs and chest, which seems to be the killer in this,” he said. Guillain-Barré syndrome is condition of the nervous system in which a person’s immune system damages the nerve cells causing muscle weakness, the CDC says.
But he added that many people who contract the coronavirus “are ending up with fairly mild cases, just like I am.”
“Other than the spike in fever and that I had a lingering dry cough, I was fine,” he said. “It was not like a regular cold so there was no sore throat, no stuffy nose, no sneezing, no body aches with a high temperature and other than that dry cough I would have been fine after about 10 hours after my fever broke.”
He said he is now “feeling great,” adding that if he wasn’t still contagious, he’d return to work.
Jerri Jorgensen, who also contracted the coronavirus while on a cruise ship but has since recovered, says hysteria surrounding the virus has “gotten out of control.”
“My case was I had a slight fever the night before they took me off the cruise ship — very slight, it wasn’t even 100 degrees,” Jorgensen told “Fox & Friends.” “Felt a little bit off for about two to three hours and that was my only symptom throughout the whole time — the whole quarantine up to now.”
