Photo by Claudio Schwarz @purzlbaum on Unsplash.
“I said, 'I'm going to stand here in your lobby until someone of authority can get him help or tell me where to get help for him.'” — Carolyn Vigil
Carolyn Vigil was lying in bed next to her husband when she first saw the meme. It noted West Virginia had no reported cases of coronavirus, and jokingly pleaded for its people to hang on.
She remembers it so well because it's the day her husband James began to feel sick in their Shepherdstown home in the West Virginia panhandle.
Her husband was sick from Covid-19. But her "coronavirus-free" state wasn't set up to test him.
He would become the state's Patient #1. They didn't know it then, of course, nor did anyone else. But in the following days they felt like that they were the only people in the state who wanted to find out. From medical professionals who simply had no information to health administrators in the same boat, all the way up to the President saying the state was doing a good job for having no cases.
