ADVO C AC Y IN AC TIO N
The Scarlet “C” THE CORONA C H RO N I C LE S, PA RT 1 Wri t t en by Dr. Ma r l e ne J. Wu st- S mi t h
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riter’s block had been plaguing me. I knew I wanted to write about the worldwide coronavirus pandemic for the March 2020 issue of Physician Outlook magazine but I did not know where to begin, what to pen that wouldn’t become obsolete within minutes of writing it. Never in my lifetime, nor in my 3 decades as a practicing physician, has medical information changed so rapidly. Because Physician Outlook is both an online AND a print magazine I did not want to write something that would become “old news” by the time the magazine hit the presses. Little did I know that my family and I would be making “front-page news” because of COVID-19, and that I would have a first-person story to recount. An experience that nearly turned my daughter and I into modern-day Hes1 8 | M A R C H / A P R I L 20 20
ter Prynnes. One in which I uncharacteristically made unwise choices (both as a mom and a physician), and one which has somewhat defiled the ethical, evidence-based way I have practiced medicine throughout my career. I gave my blessing to my daughter to board an international flight to London, England on March 7, 2020, at a time when I knew that the World Health Organization (WHO) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) were recommending the now all too familiar 2020 verb called “social distancing.” I knew that the situation with this virus had escalated and it was running rampant through Northern Italy. The UK had closed its borders to China early on in the epidemic, and was one of the countries that was reporting the fewest cases. More and more cases were being reported in the United States. I really thought of this like influenza,
which had already caused more than 30000 deaths in the US when we first heard about coronavirus, but the media wasn’t hyping that up. The risk of traveling to the UK seemed one that was worth taking. In fact, I was pretty sure that I myself had already been exposed to coronavirus on U.S. soil at the end of January and in early February when I treated a student that had spent her winter break in southern China who returned to campus with a fever and cough days after landing in the US (more about that later, but the CDC refused to test because of the lack of travel to the Hubei province). My personal hypothesis is that this student (who continued to cough for weeks) likely passed it on to several others on campus. I had a cluster of student patients with influenza-like illnesses who had negative flu swabs (it is important to note, how-
