‘Don’t panic’ says US woman who recovered from coronavirus

An American woman who has recovered from the novel coronavirus has a simple message for people who are worried: Don’t panic — but do think about high-risk individuals and stay home if you feel ill.

Elizabeth Schneider lives in Seattle, the biggest city of Washington state, which has the most deaths in the United States from the disease sweeping the globe.

The 37-year-old, who has a PhD in bioengineering, said she was sharing her story “to give people a little bit of hope” through her own relatively mild experience with the infection, which she treated herself from home.

But, she added, “obviously, it’s not something to be completely nonchalant about, because there are a lot of people who are elderly or have underlying health conditions.

“That means that we need to be extra vigilant about staying home, isolating ourselves from others.”

This week, US health authorities citing Chinese data said 80 percent of cases have been mild, while the remaining serious cases that required hospitalization affected mainly people over 60 and those with conditions like diabetes, heart disease or lung disease.

– The party –

Schneider first began experiencing flu-like symptoms on February 25, three days after going to a party that was later identified as the place where at least five other people also got infected.

“I woke up and I was feeling tired, but it was nothing more than what you normally feel when you have to get up and go to work, and I had been very busy the previous weekend,” she told AFP in an interview Wednesday.

By midday, however, she felt a headache coming on, along with a fever and body aches. She decided to leave the office of the biotechnology company where she works as a marketing manager, and went home.