Quarantine puts her life in perspective

With ‘end in sight,’ Redwood City woman plans time with family, friends and the outdoors

TRAVIS AFB >> Hiking in the parks near her home on the Peninsula, relaxing at the beach, hosting a big party with friends and family.

Kathy Wright is making plans for how she will get back to the life the coronavirus put on hold, once the 60-year-old is finally allowed to go home Wednesday after spending a month cooped up in quarantines — first aboard the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and then in an apartment at Travis Air Force Base.

Spending time outdoors and enjoying her freedom top the list.

“I’m feeling great, because I feel like there’s an end in sight, finally,” Wright said.

At the same time, Wright said she is also feeling some trepidation about going back into a world that is increasingly on edge as the coronavirus has spread both abroad and within the United States. Officials on Saturday announced that a man in Washington state had become the first person to die from the illness in this country, and they have confirmed a handful of cases around the Bay Area.

“You’re almost a leper,” Wright said. Even though she has tested negative, she added, “I wonder how people will feel around me.”

Wright’s experience has been particularly trying. A little more than a week ago, she learned that her husband, Rick Wright, with whom she was traveling and in quarantine, had tested positive for the virus.

He was whisked away for quarantine in a hospital room in San Francisco, but despite that scare, he has never shown any sign of being sick. Because he was feeling fine, Rick Wright has been released from the hospital to quarantine himself at the couple’s Redwood City home. What happens next with him could depend on further tests. Kathy Wright said she hopes her husband will be released from his quarantine orders the same day she is.

Saturday marked six weeks since the Wrights left their home for the cruise they had booked to celebrate sending their third and youngest child off to college.

Hundreds of passengers from their ship have contracted coronavirus.

On Friday, the BBC reported that a British man had become the sixth passenger to die from it.

Some of the other American cruise ship passengers who were taken to Travis Air Force Base along with the Wrights will get to leave on Monday, but Kathy Wright’s time with her husband means she has to stay longer to complete 14 days since her last exposure to an infected person.

Rick Wright’s ordeal has left her alone in the onebedroom apartment at the base, which she compared to a condo building — albeit one surrounded by chain-link fences, spotlights and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The solitude was an adjustment for the usually outgoing Bay Area native who grew up in a family with six siblings.

Now she expects the same will be true about having so much more human contact next week.

“It is going to be odd, just being more social again,” Kathy Wright said. “I feel like I’ve been a hermit for this past month.”

She fills her days with yoga and exercise, and spends time watching jackrabbits bound across the base’s lawns from her balcony and eating the “pretty good” meals that are brought to her three times each day.

Wright is allowed to go for walks outside around the apartment building, so long as she wears a mask and doesn’t come close to any other people.

Wright, who works as a nurse injector in a plastic surgeon’s office, has been following news about the virus closely and chats by video with her husband and family.

“Thank God we live in the Facetime era,” she said. “It hasn’t been awful, it’s just been really long.”

Still, Wright is the kind of person who can see a silver lining to her monthlong quarantine.

“Something like this really makes you see how much you take for granted in life,” Wright said.

She described living “very minimally” during the quarantine, which she said has forced her to be introspective — to slow down and think about “your life and where you’re at and what’s important.”

“You really see that family and friends is everything,” Wright said. “It’s not stuff.”