The Sophie Beaumont building in downtown Green Bay is home the Brown County Department of Health and Human Services. (WTAQ/Casey Nelson)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — You don’t want to contract COVID-19.
That’s what former COVID-19 patients said Wednesday morning during a press briefing as part of Brown County Health Department’s “Faces of COVID” series.
Deacon and business owner Steve Meyer was diagnosed with the virus very early in the pandemic and was among the first cases in Brown County. He was exposed to the virus through his wife, and while her case was mild, his devolved quickly. He woke up in the night drenched in sweat, he could taste nor smell food or drink, and he was having trouble breathing.
“I remember the fear, the fear on the faces and in the voices of my family…and the fear I felt in myself when I struggled to breathe,” Meyer said. “I just couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.”
Meyer says he originally thought it was just a flu, but later became sicker than he’s ever been.
While Meyer eventually recovered, Jennifer Webster’s father didn’t.
He was hospitalized with the virus, and died within a few days. Webster, an Oneida Nation tribal member who serves on the Oneida Business council, had to grieve in the hospital parking lot–no visitors were allowed inside.
“All we could do was sit in our cars,” Webster recalled of his death in May. “I can’t tell you how hard it is to grieve without being able to hug your loved ones, and our Oneida families are very close.”
They wound up having a drive-thru funeral service for her father.
Dan Unright is in his early 30s and in good shape–he works as a personal trainer–so when he tested positive for COVID-19, he wasn’t worried. Neither was his wife Lindsey, who works in the healthcare industry.
They thought his case would be mild.
“Because of my belief, I ignored the chest pain I started to have,” Unright told reporters. “My oxygen started to drop, and that’s when I wound up in the hospital.”
When he arrived, his condition worsened. He wound up in the intensive care unit. Doctors told him if it got any worse, he would have to be intubated.
Unright managed to begin recovering before he had to be placed on oxygen, but spent a full ten days in the hospital fighting the virus.
The patients told their stories on a day where another 202 patients tested positive for COVID-19 in Brown County, bringing the total to 13,140 since the start of the pandemic, with 81 deaths. On the bright side, another 390 were released from isolation.
“You do not want to get COVID,” Meyer said. “And you certainly don’t want to be responsible for giving it to anyone else.”
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