One family accounted for 25 cases
Almost 10 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Newfoundland and Labrador come from one family in St. John’s.
On March 12, Edward Tobin died, and arrangements were made for the wake, to be held at Caul’s Funeral Home on March 15 and 16.
Tina Holden attended the funeral to send her respects to her uncle and support her family.
“I had already been isolating. I was really nervous about going to my uncle’s wake, but I really didn’t want to miss it,” said Holden.
“I wanted to get there earlier. It was a really sunny Sunday, so I figured most people would probably go in the evening and I wouldn’t be around many people. I’m a big hugger, so it was like, OK I’m not hugging anybody. It was an uncomfortable situation to walk into a situation where your family is upset and mourning and you can’t hug them.”
Holden says she kept her visit brief, only for about 20 minutes and didn’t see the person who is understood to have brought the coronavirus into the funeral home.
On March 21, everything changed. “Saturday morning, my phone was ringing off the hook. It was my mother and my aunt. They were saying that my uncle was really, really sick and his friend had tested positive,” said Holden.
Holden says there was a scramble within the family to work with public health officials and find out how quickly people could be tested. Given the early stage of the outbreak, public health officials were only testing people with multiple symptoms of the coronavirus.
Holden has asthma and was concerned about how she would fare with the virus. She got the test.
“In my case, I did have symptoms. But I also have health conditions that some of those symptoms come with my existing illness,” she said.
“I knew I wasn’t exposed, so I wasn’t too, too worried about it. But you never know where you can pick it up. When mine came back negative, I was really paying attention to my symptoms, documenting them and seeing if they were changing or worsening.”
Holden says while most people had mild symptoms, others saw the infection escalate quickly.
“Some people just had a scratchy throat and others were so, so sick. The speed of that was shocking,
how sick some of them got,” she said.
“Within 48 hours up to 72 hours, it got really scary for a couple of them.”
Holden, an artist whose studio happens to be across the road from the funeral home, says she made a post on Facebook to let her family know the potential for exposure. She later made the post public on social media, and quickly saw the shares explode to more than 3,000.
She says she got many messages of support — and then the harassment began.
“It was demoralizing. It was demeaning. I was shaking by the time I got through maybe half of it,” she said.
“And then I look and there’s all these private messages sent to me from complete strangers just attacking.”
Ultimately, 25 family members tested positive for COVID-19, ranging in age from 20 to the mid-70s.
Bill Woolridge, another of Holden’s uncles, spoke during Thursday’s COVID19
briefing with Premier Dwight Ball, Health Minister Dr. John Haggie and Chief Medical Officer of Health
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald.
Woolridge says his first COVID-19 symptom appeared on
March 19. A headache and some pressure in the forehead appeared, but Woolridge says he didn’t think much of it.
On Saturday, March 21, Woolridge says, he got word from a family member that someone had attended Caul’s Funeral Home and tested positive for the coronavirus.
On Sunday, Woolridge says, the fever and chills set in, so he called the 811 health line. On March 24, Woolridge and his wife were tested. On March 25, Woolridge says, he tested positive, while his wife tested negative.
“During my sickness, I experienced fever, chills, sweats, fatigue, cough, headache and loss of appetite. For at least six consecutive days, my fever ranged between 100.5 to 101 Fahrenheit. During the overnight, especially, I experienced chills and excessive sweating,” Woolridge said.
Woolridge says his symptoms let up between April 2 and 3, and he and his wife both tested negative for the virus on April 4.
“I will tell you, we’re glad to be through this period,” he said.
“If I could sum it up in one word: thankful. We’re very thankful for the recovery of our family and friends.”
Holden said she hopes her family’s story can show others what the coronavirus can do. While none of the 25 who contracted the coronavirus died from the infection, three people in Newfoundland and Labrador have died of COVID-19.
“I’m concerned that people are going to start getting complacent. They’re going to forget. This was last month’s story. Every day we’re hearing that there are zero cases, and that’s fantastic news,” said Holden.
“But it wouldn’t be a pandemic if it didn’t have these kind of trends where you have clusters, then it seems to go away for a little bit, and it explodes somewhere else.”
Despite the hardship, Holden says she holds no ill feeling toward the person who brought the coronavirus to the funeral home.
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we were exposed to a disease — not a person, not a human, this virus was in the building,” said Holden.
“It’s like trying to blame whoever caught it in Wuhan. To me, it really doesn’t matter in terms of blame. This is not an intentional situation. This wasn’t homicide. This is a really scary disease that’s caught the world off guard. It’s forced us to reshape our lives.”