Former Cape resident, parents detail battle with COVID-19, quarantine in basement

Katherine Carns is seen during her COVID-19 quarantine in her parents basement in Fenton, Missouri.

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Katherine Carns knew something was wrong.

The 21-year-old college student and former Cape Girardeau resident was flying back to St. Louis from Madrid when she began feeling sick somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

It was March 13, hours before President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 European travel restrictions went into effect.

A third-year student at the University of Missouri-Columbia where she is studying biology and Spanish, Carns was in Madrid as part of a “study abroad” program when she and other U.S. citizens were told they had to head home due to the coronavirus pandemic. Among European cities, few have been hit harder by the coronavirus outbreak than Madrid.

“I woke up that morning really fatigued, but I had been up super late packing because of the border closing announcement and the chaos of that week, so I didn’t think anything of it,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Fenton, Missouri. “I was already wearing a mask for precautionary measures, and I’m really glad I did.”

Dr. Wendi Carns is seen outside the emergency department triage tent at St. John Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis.

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She didn’t realize it at the time, but her “fatigue” was about to turn into a full-blown case of COVID-19 and she would soon become one of Missouri’s first coronavirus patients.

“Then on my flight from Madrid to Atlanta, I started having body aches and could tell I was stating to have a fever,” she said. “And then during my layover waiting for my flight to St. Louis, I had horrible body aches and chills, I was definitely running a high fever and was coughing, so I went ahead and called my parents and said, ‘Hey, I think I’m sick ... can you bring a mask and gloves with you when you pick me up?’ I think I also asked my dad to bring an ice pack because I was so hot. ”

By that point, Carns was beginning to suspect she had the coronavirus.

“I had my suspicions,” she said. “I was hoping it wasn’t (coronavirus), but I had been following the disease for a while and knew it was starting to get really explosive in Madrid,” she said. “I had also done a little bit of traveling in Portugal two weeks before, so there was a possible exposure there.”

Her father, Dan Carns, wearing gloves and a mask, met her at the St. Louis airport. By that time, she was weak, coughing and running a 103.7-degree fever.

Dan Carns brings a meal tray to his daughter, Katherine, during her quarantine in the family's basement in Fenton, Missouri.

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“My husband said she looked terrible and was having a hard time walking because she was coughing and was short of breath,” said Katherine’s mother, Dr. Wendi Carns, a physician who specializes in obstetrics and gynecology and practiced in Cape Girardeau from 2004 until 2017 when the family moved to the St. Louis area and she became affiliated with Mercy Medical System.

Instead of going home from the airport, Dan and Katherine went to the emergency department at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center.

“He took her straight to the ER and they told her she probably had it (coronavirus), but they’d have to test her for it,” Wendi Carns said. “They also gave Dan an N95 mask because the ER doctor was fairly concerned he would get sick, too. Dan is 50 and has some other medical conditions, and at the time men were dying (from coronavirus) more than women were.”

As bad as she felt in the emergency department, Katherine said she was confident she would recover.

“There really wasn’t a time that I was worried I would die,” she said, adding, “If anything, I really was more worried about infecting my dad.”

Katherine believes her youth and overall health put her in a good position to deal with her infection.

“This sounds strange, but I was the perfect person to get it. I’m super healthy, I don’t have any previous health conditions and I’m in my 20s, which has best survival rate, but no, I really wasn’t afraid for myself,” she said. “However, there was one moment when I arrived at the ER and they told me they would have to come get me in full PPE (personal protective equipment). I was running a fever and I was exhausted from my trip and I was crying so I was a little scared.”

Katherine was among the first confirmed cases of coronavirus in Missouri.

“I think before I was tested there had only been one other confirmed case or maybe a handful, but I was one of the first,” she said.

Basement quarantine

Katherine’s symptoms weren’t serious enough to require hospitalization, so she and her father went home where she quarantined herself in the family’s basement.

“Living in the basement was interesting,” she said. “Luckily, our basement is pretty nice, so I had a living room, a bedroom, a fridge and a bathroom, so it was like my own little condo.”

Her father, decked out in gloves and an N95 mask, brought her meal trays three times a day. As a financial planner, he was able to work from home and care for Katherine even before the statewide “stay-at-home” order went into effect earlier this month.

“It was a little hard listening to my brother (Ryan, 17) and my dad having fun upstairs and I couldn’t join them, but during that time, we really stayed on top of everything, like disinfecting everything and making sure Dad was wearing a mask when he came down to see me,” she said.

It took nine days for Katherine’s test results to come back confirming she did, indeed, have coronavirus.

“So I’m glad we took the precautions that we did,” she said.

To avoid any possible infection from her daughter, Wendi Carns moved out of the house for several weeks.

“Dan called me from the ER and said, ‘You need to find a place to stay,’ so I packed a bag and moved to a friend’s house for what I thought would be two or three days,” she said. “I ended up staying in a friend’s guest room for three weeks with three days of clothes, so I ended up doing a lot of laundry while I was living at my friend’s house.”

During those three weeks, the only way she saw her daughter was through a glass door.

“My friend and I would go grocery shopping for them and we’d open the garage door and set the groceries inside, back up and then talk to Dan from 10 feet away,” she said. “And then I would go down to the basement and wave through the door to Katherine. It was surreal.”

Katherine’s fever lasted five days while the cough went on for about a week and a half.

“I think the worst part of it for her is she felt like crap and nobody could sit with her,” Wendi Carns said. “She admitted to me last week that she was terrified she was going to kill her dad by giving it (coronavirus) to him and that he would die from it. That’s a heavy load to carry.”

“I was terrified about who I might have infected on the way home or if I was going to infect my dad, so that was probably the worst part for me,” Katherine said. “All I wanted was a hug from my parents and I couldn’t do that because I was sick.”

After three weeks of basement living, and 10 days with no symptoms, Katherine’s quarantine ended. As a COVID-19 survivor, she will soon donate blood and plasma, which medical experts hope can be used to help develop a coronavirus vaccine.

Missouri surge

Meanwhile, the coronavirus outbreak has impacted Wendi Carns’ medical practice. She continues to deliver babies, but most of the elective gynecological procedures at her office have been canceled or postponed.

“I’ve canceled 40 cases in April and several in May that will have to be rescheduled. We’ve also changed the way we’re doing obstetric visits and doing a lot of video visits instead of having patients come into the office, so our office volume has dropped dramatically and I’m only in the office a day and a half a week,” she said. “They’ve also consolidated our call groups so fewer providers are in the hospital each day to limit our exposure and hopefully maintain the health of the staff.”

In the meantime, she has been assigned to the emergency department’s triage tent.

“My schedule has totally changed and seems to change almost daily,” she said. “It’s bizarre.”

Missouri health officials expect the state’s “surge” of coronavirus cases will happen by later this week or early next week.

“From what I’ve been told, Missouri has done a really good job of ‘flattening the curve’ and we can anticipate how many ventilators we’re going to need, how many ICU beds and things like that, and the number has been dropping because people are doing the right thing,” she said.

As for Katherine Carns, she’s looking forward to resuming her studies and eventually earning a master’s degree and working with the World Health Organization as an epidemiologist, someone who studies diseases such as the coronavirus.

“I will definitely have a story, that’s for sure,” she said. “Living in Madrid during the outbreak and getting infected myself is definitely something for the books!”