Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
REVEALED: BRITAIN’S 1ST COVID PATIENT..
Mum’s ‘flu’ was UK’S earliest community transmission case
THE first coronavirus patient known to have contracted the disease in Britain has told how she nearly died as her illness mystified medics.
Joanne Rogers, 51, fell ill with what she thought was flu i n lat e January, before the first UK cases had been confirmed.
When she was rushed to hospital two weeks later, h ealth chi efs were sti l l insisting that Covid-19 was restricted to a small number of people recently arrived from abroad.
But the virus was already spreading through communities and just over a month lat er so many cases were being treated in hospital that the country was put into lockdown.
The Mirror can now reveal cleaner
Joanne, from Colchester, Essex, is the earliest known confirmed case of person-to-person transmission in the UK. And eight months on, she is still suffering a severe form of Long Covid.
Joanne had been ill in bed for a fortnight when worried partner Richard Shepherd called NHS 111 for advice on February 15. An ambulance was sent to rush Joanna to hospital.
At the time, nine people were being isolated by Public Health England – mainly Chinese students and a handful of people who had come in to contact with an infected person at a French ski resort – and the Government was still hoping to avoid a UK outbreak. Joanna told the Mirror : “I felt a bit of a fraud to have an ambulance coming out for me because I just thought I had the flu.
“One of the last things I remember was going into resuscitation and joking with the doctor, saying, ‘I’m not going to die am I?’ He said: ‘Not on my shift.’”
Within 24 hours, she was diagnosed with pneumonia and put in an induced coma. It was the start of a gruelling illness from which she has yet to recover.
Joanne underwent a tracheostomy, in which a tube is inserted in to the windpipe just below the vocal chords.
Medics had no idea what was causing such a severe bout of pneumonia and could only put on Joanne on a ventilator to give her body a chance to battle the
I thought I had the flu and felt a fraud going to hospital JOANNE ROGERS ON RUSH TO INTENSIVE CARE
mystery illness. s. However, the he v ir us had trigggered a massive, ive, potentially fatal overreaction of the e body’s immune system m known as a “cytokine storm”. ”
A small number of drugs have since been shown to help dampen this immune response in Cov i d-19 patients but at the time the doctors treating Joanne were working blind.
Daughter Lauren, 20, said: “Richard ca came home one da day and told me to sit down. He’d been told it was 50/50. He star started t e cr ying and said, ‘I don’t d think your mum is goin going to make it’.” J Joanne hd had not recently been abroad and has no idea how she could have caught the virus. She took no test during her 17 days in intensive care. When she finally got an antibody test in June it confirmed she had had the virus. Prof Francois Balloux, of
University College London, said: “I think this will be the earliest documented confirmed case in the UK.
“It’s quite reasonable to believe this was circulating in January.
“Back then, no one could have predicted what a cat astroph e thi s would be. I’m absolut ely convinced there will have been quite a few undiagnosed cases.
“It is estimated there were around 1,400 separate introductions of Covid-19 id 19 into i t the th UK UK.
“That’s why in the UK there’s really no such thing as a ‘patient zero’, because so many places had it. This made it very difficult to control here.”
Joanne suffered terrifying dreams in her 12-day coma, which continue to this day. She suffers anxiety, extreme fatigue and muscle pain but her sick pay ended this month and she was
turned down for Personal Independence Payments, because Long Covid is not recognised as a disability.
So she has been forced to go back to work but can only manage two hours a day. She said: “I’ve been told it could last a month for every day I was in intensive care.”
Lauren added: “Mum’s not getting better because she’s had to go back to work.
“I t ’s such vicious cycle.” In all, ll th there have been 873,800 UK Covid cases, with the death toll standing at 44,896.
Until now, the first person known to have contracted the virus in the UK was a 75-year-old woman from Surrey, identified via a test sample given on February 21.