SIGNALING A CRISIS
A look back at Connecticut’s first COVID-19 death
In mid-March last year, staff members at an assisted-living community in Ridgefield realized that Fred Marchionna’s weeklong cold symptoms had gotten much worse.
The cough and a runny nose that the 88-year-old retired businessman had suffered all week and downplayed to his family, had now descended into his chest. His breathing grew more labored, a sign of pneumonia.
It was clear on March 13 that Marchionna needed medical help.
That was the day when much of normal life throughout the United States ceased. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, and amid pressure over the shortage of testing capacity for the new coronavirus, he declared, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
In Connecticut, 2,000 people applied for jobless benefits that day, signaling an abrupt recession. The Department of Public Health reported that among the dozen Connecticut residents with COVID-19, most were middle-aged or younger.
Marchionna’s eldest son, Michael, had last visited on Wednesday, the day before Benchmark Senior Living at Ridgefield Crossings closed to outsiders. “He just seemed to be getting worse,” Michael recalled this month.
That Friday night, Fred struggled to catch his breath. An ambulance crew arrived and rushed him the 7.7 miles to Danbury Hospital.
Emergency room staff including Dr. Paul Nee gave Marchionna a coronavirus test. An infectious disease expert, Nee was on the lookout for the next COVID-19 patient, a week after Connecticut’s first confirmed case appeared in that same hospital.
Lynn Ecsedy, Michael’s sister, met her father in the hospital Emergency Department that Friday night.
By Sunday, the test report came back showing Marchionna was positive for COVID-19. His breathing was becoming more difficult. The virus was going about its deadly business.
The hospital staff gave Fred oxygen therapy. When that didn’t help he was put on comfort care, because his living will prohibited intubation — a ventilator tube down his windpipe to keep him breathing on a machine.
Marchionna has not been identified until now and his family has not previously spoken about his case.
The cascade of dire symptoms continued. When Lynn came back to see him on Monday the 16th, he was able to speak, but just barely.
The governor
Connecticut’s first case was reported on March 6, a New York resident who worked in Danbury and Norwalk hospitals. Now, top government and medical officials were preparing for the worst.
“We just knew that New Rochelle, then New York City was the hot spot and it was coming our way,” Gov. Ned Lamont recalled recently. “We had talked to Phil Murphy,” he said of the New Jersey governor, “and it was coming his way.”
Working the phones to the White House, which Lamont described as “pretty dysfunctional,” led to little help. “They kept talking about it in terms of states. We said it’s a not a state, it’s a region. This is a contagion that knows no borders.”
Information on the virus was still scant.
“What you don’t know can kill you and we didn’t know a lot,” Lamont said in his State Capitol office. “And there weren’t many people you could go to. Let’s face it. There was no PPE stockpile. Washington D.C. was, on a good day, AWOL, and generally negative...or you’re getting absolutely wrong-headed signals that were dangerous.”
Lamont started working with the northeast-region governors, whose chiefs of staff, including Paul Mounds in his office, set up close contacts. Lamont was terrified that hospitals would get overwhelmed. He wondered, “Are we going to have gurneys sitting in the hallways?”
Just days earlier, experts such as Dr. Albert Ko at the Yale School of Public Health and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were saying the general public didn’t need to worry about wearing masks. That changed quickly, worsening the shortage at hospitals.
“If I couldn’t get the masks, you couldn’t get the nurses in and if you can’t get the nurses in, who’s going to take care of people?” Lamont said.
He and other governors in the region launched daily news conferences that included medical experts as guests.
“You can’t pretend you know the answers,” Lamont said, looking back on those briefings. “But you have to tell people why you’re thinking about it, and if you change, why you changed. I think people gave all the governors a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, because we were thinking out loud together.”
The doctors
Dr. Michael F. Parry, chairman of infectious diseases at Stamford Hospital, saw it coming from Asia in early January. By February, he called for town-hall style meetings with staff to discuss the “new pneumonia” working its way across the Pacific Ocean to Washington State.
“We talked about the kind of ER management to observe in case we ran into someone from overseas and if you happened to see a patient from China and he’s
febrile and short of breath,” Parry recalled of the telltale fever and signs that COVID was working into patients’ lungs.
By the first week of March, the hospital was stocking up on supplies and establishing a coronavirus protocol.
Parry, who turns 76 this month, came back from semi-retirement for the pandemic. Stamford Hospital saw its first case around the time Fred Marchionna was diagnosed in Danbury Hospital.
The shortage in COVID tests limited their availability to patients with symptoms. Results could take a week.
“Our percentage of positive tests was about 50 percent. The need for PPE was intense,” Parry recalled. “Nursing home populations were heavily infected.”
At Danbury Hopsital, Dr. Nee and his colleagues established procedures for treating people with COVID-19. Daily conference calls tracked N95 masks, gowns and gloves. The staff started planning what could happen if a major outbreak occurred. Testing simply wasn’t available.
“We weren’t sure whether we were preparing on the hospital level,” Nee said, “And on the 6th, it hit us like an unexpected left hook.”
All of that was on Nee’s mind one week later when he spoke with Ecsedy after Fred Marchionna arrived from Ridgefield Crossings.
The patient
Most weeknights in the year following the death of his wife, Beverly, Fred Marchionna would get a visit from Michael, an aerospace-software engineer who worked nearby. They would watch some of the early news on TV, chat about the day for 15 or 20 minutes, then walk to the elevator for dinner downstairs.
Michael would exchange pleasantries with his father’s table mates, then head home for his own dinner in Southbury with his wife, Laura.
A longtime employee and executive at PerkinElmer, Fred Marchionna was born in Columbus, Ohio and grew up in Washington, D.C. He met Beverly Wheeler when they were students at the University of Maryland, in the early 1950s — when she was dating someone else.
After serving as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, Marchionna joined RCA, working on that company’s radar division in southern New Jersey. In 1965 the family moved to Connecticut, where Fred took a job at PerkinElmer, one of the region’s major employers.
He loved model trains, science fiction and gadgetry, rising in the company to business administrator, focusing on large-scale planning, including the construction of the company’s Danbury headquarters, and working on its bestknown project: the Hubble Space Telescope.
Fred and Beverly lived in Bethel, Newtown, Cornwall and New Milford, where Fred ran the annual holiday train show. They raised four children: Michael, now 65; and Lynn, Susan and James. In 1973, Fred was endorsed to fill a vacancy on the Newtown Board of Finance. After retiring from PerkinElmer in 1988, he soon became the office manager for a Waterbury law firm.
In their New Milford ranch house, chock-full of dozens of antique clocks the couple collected, Fred had a perfect set-up: a full basement for his wood shop and elaborate, L-shaped modeltrain layout. An accomplished woodworker, Fred presented each of his four children with handmade Shaker-style, slant-top secretary desks as marriage gifts. The first grandkids got custom, hand-hewn oak rocking horses, for family heirlooms.
But by 2016 or so, Beverly was developing some age-related health issues and Fred became worried about their future.
Michael took some of the tools and trains when Fred and Beverly moved into a one-bedroom unit at Ridgefield Crossings on busy Route 7. His parents didn’t have to worry about cooking or keeping up a property, and could enjoy each other’s company in what would become the last year of Beverly’s life.
On Monday, March 9, 2020 just four days after the first anniversary of his mother’s death at age 86, Michael noticed that his father had cold symptoms.
“I generally didn’t see him over the weekend, but he was coughing and his nose was running more than normal,” Michael said. By Wednesday it was escalating. Lynn, 64, visited her father that night, watching Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, then a nature show.
“He kept coughing, but said it’s just a cold,” Lynn recalled Friday.
She told him she was worried. He didn’t want to see the staff nurse. “That generation didn’t really want to talk about things like that,” she said.
On Thursday, Fred called Michael to tell him not to come by after work. Management had put the facility in lockdown as part of Lamont’s early round of executive orders, limiting visitors in longterm care facilities.
Michael worried about the outbreak. He was scared that healthcare workers from Norwalk and Stamford could bring the virus to Ridgefield Crossings’ vulnerable elderly population of 138 residents in the three areas of the complex: assisted living, memory care, and rehabilitation.
The chief of staff
Paul Mounds had just been promoted to Lamont’s chief of staff at the end of February. A former aide to U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1, then a legislative liaison in the State Capitol under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Mounds remembers a blur of meetings that week, as Marchionna’s illness emerged.
On Saturday the 7th, while his wife and parents took him out to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse to celebrate his 35th birthday, Mounds kept looking down at his cellphone to track events the day after Lamont joined Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton to announce the state’s first COVID case.
By 9:30 Sunday morning, Mounds and Josh Geballe — who
as Lamont’s chief operating officer would emerge as the governor’s point man in the COVID crisis — were meeting with state health officials, Lamont adviser Jonathan Harris, and Bob Clark, Lamont’s chief legal counsel, to discuss strategy. They mapped out drafts of emergency declarations.
On Monday March 9, as Fred Marchionna was showing the first signs of his infection, Lamont got on a call with a dozen other governors and the White House.
“That week was a real trial by fire,” Mounds recalled, with Lamont engaged in back-to-back meetings with staff, leading lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and corporate CEOs.
“It was frantic,” Mounds remembered. “There was no playbook for this. It’s so easy to overthink. It’s so easy to underthink. It’s hard to calmly think. I couldn’t catch my breath. There were life-and-death situations and we didn’t know how rampant COVID was in our state. The good thing was, we had leadership in our commissioners and we were rowing in the same direction. But there were so many unknowns.”
The death
Lynn stayed overnight with her father that Friday night at Danbury Hospital. Family visits were not yet barred but were supposed to last for just an hour. “He was really very quiet and pretty much slept the whole night,” she said.
She recalled being masked up and likely exposed to the virus. An antibody test later indicated that she was never infected. Her father was finally admitted
around 4 a.m. and she stayed another few hours, getting home to Brookfield at around 9.
Michael visited on that Sunday, the day the test came back, and Lynn was there the following day. Their father was able to talk but was sleepy. “He was very, very tired, but he knew I was there,” Lynn said. “I told him I loved him.”
The nursing staff gave Lynn his blood oxygen-level readings, announcing when he reached the level at which a patient’s condition was dire enough to normally go on a ventilator.
“The hospital was very nice to let us visit,” Lynn said. “I don’t know if there was anything they could have done for him.”
But in the pandemic, they could not remain with their father.
Marchionna was taken to the seventh floor, to a comfort-care area near the intensive care unit, a signal to the family that their father was dying. The hospital staff arranged for a brief video visit for Fred with Lynn and Michael’s younger sister, Susan, in North Carolina.
James, their younger brother, was supposed to drive down from Vermont on the 17th, but Lynn doesn’t know if he did. They haven’t talked about it.
Frederick H. Marchionna died at 10:24 p.m. on Tuesday, March 17, 2020 — Connecticut’s first COVID fatality. The state would not learn of his death until well into the following afternoon.
Dr. Nee phoned Lynn to say her father had died. His death certificate lists acute respiratory distress, pneumonia and COVID-19 as the causes of death.
Soon after, all visitors were
prohibited at Connecticut hospitals. “I’m sure it’s been very difficult for the hospital staff,” Lynn said. “The staff has been filling in for families.” She doesn’t know if anyone was with Fred when he died.
The announcement
On the day after his father died, Michael Marchionna began showing his first symptoms of COVID: massive aches across entire muscle groups, as if his entire body were cramping up. Symptoms lasted for about five days, with a couple days of slight fevers. He rated the pain level at eight out of 10.
That afternoon, Lamont stood on the north steps of the historic State Capitol, and solemnly announced the state’s first COVID fatality. “I regret to inform you that we’ve had our first Connecticut fatality .... And the first death is not unexpected, but it’s a shock. It’s a shock because it makes this so real for all of our families. Our hearts go out to that man and his family.”
Lamont called for a moment of silence. “Our hearts go out to all the families across the state of Connecticut and our great state.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal issued a statement acknowledging the death of Marchionna, though not by name, offering his thoughts to the family.
“This tragic death demonstrates the critical need for more robust federal action to fight this insidious deadly epidemic,” he wrote. “Swift, strong federal action — a true medical surge — must include more tests, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and other vital supplies.”
For Nee, it was the start of a cascade of infections. “He was from a facility that was hit hard,” the physician said of Fred Marchionna. The state Department of Public Health reports that 29 residents at Ridgefield Crossings died from COVID-related causes by the end of 2020.
“As we reflect on the past year, we first honor the fond memory of this resident, as we do for his fellow, beloved members of our community who have passed during the global pandemic,” said William Crawford, executive director of Ridgefield Crossings, in a statement on Friday. “We will never forget those we lost due to the pandemic and look toward the future with immense hope that the worst of the global spread of COVID-19 is far behind us.”
“There’s been a lot of tragedy,” Dr. Nee said. “But there are a lot of people we saved who got very sick. We prevented moms and dads from dying. We all do our best every day at the hospital. Everyone has become so much closer, the nurses, the technicians.”
As of Friday 7,765 Connecticut residents had died with confirmed or suspected coronavirus, well more than half of them 80 or older. A memorial service is being planned for Fred Marchionna on April 10, at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Southbury.