Carl Goldman, 67, and his wife embarked on a trip to Asia last month aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess.
On Day 16, while the ship was docked in Hong Kong, a passenger was diagnosed with a new infection spreading in China — the coronavirus. The captain doubled the ship’s speed and raced back to Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3, entering port a day earlier than planned.
The passengers disembarked and the couple flew back to the United States on a 747 cargo plane, specially outfitted for possible coronavirus patients with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials and medical personnel on board.
“When we sat down to take off I dozed off, it was the middle of the night, [I] woke up two hours later with a very heavy fever. It was over 103,” Goldman told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday. “There was a doctor on board the plane. He put us in a quarantine area and we flew on to Travis Air Force base.”
Once they arrived, everyone was unloaded — everyone “except for three of us and our three spouses,” he said. They were flown to Omaha, Nebraska, and he was “put into a biocontainment unit for 10 days.” He compared his time in quarantine to “a scene out of the movie ‘The Andromeda Strain,’” a 1969 techno-thriller about a team of scientists investigating the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in Arizona.
“Everyone entering the room, had hazmat suits on, double pane glass, two TV monitors, two TV cameras watching me at all times and then I would talk back to a central command post via two-way video, nurses came in about every four hours to attend to me, I was hooked up with monitors and luckily after ten days in there, I did get to spend my 67th birthday in there, in quarantine, so that’s a unique story,” Goldman said.
Goldman, who appeared on the Fox show via Skype from the quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said he was more vulnerable to the virus because of a pre-existing health condition.
“I had a precondition called Guillain-Barré syndrome and I think that’s why they put me in the biocontainment to make sure that I was stable and that the virus did not go into my lungs and chest, which seems to be the killer in this,” he said. Guillain-Barré syndrome is condition of the nervous system in which a person’s immune system damages the nerve cells causing muscle weakness, the CDC says.
But he added that many people who contract the coronavirus “are ending up with fairly mild cases, just like I am.”
“Other than the spike in fever and that I had a lingering dry cough, I was fine,” he said. “It was not like a regular cold so there was no sore throat, no stuffy nose, no sneezing, no body aches with a high temperature and other than that dry cough I would have been fine after about 10 hours after my fever broke.”
He said he is now “feeling great,” adding that if he wasn’t still contagious, he’d return to work.
Goldman has been chronicling his ordeal on a daily blog. And he added one detail, too, about his treatment.
“Despite all the monitors attached to me, there is no medication being given. My only medication is (drum roll, please) Gatorade,” Goldman wrote. “This virus is so unknown, there is no cure except to allow it to work its way through my system. There are no antibiotics, no IVs, not even nose drops, just Gatorade.”