Three weeks ago, Australia was a very different place.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton had just caught coronavirus and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s beloved Cronulla Sharks were playing their first game of the season in front of a large crowd.
It was around this time that Sydney woman Amie Morris went on a date with a man she had seen a few times, but did not know too well.
“It has got to be the worst date story ever,” the 38-year-old, who works in radio in Bondi, told SBS News.
“He had a cough, like a dry cough … I said ‘I hope you don’t have coronavirus’, as a joke. Literally, two days later I woke up and it started with a sore throat.”
“Within 24 hours it went from the sore throat to a fever and really feeling quite unwell.”
Amie went to see a doctor who didn’t think she had COVID-19, so they tested her for everything else, but the results came back negative.
She was sent to get a coronavirus test and to her surprise, it came back positive.
“I called him [her date] up and was like ‘umm so I have something to tell you, I have had a swab done and it was positive’ and he was like ‘umm right, ok’ and I think he was shocked,” she said.
He was diagnosed with coronavirus too.
For Amie, the symptoms started out ok, like a mild version of influenza, she said, which she had had before.
“I felt really fluey. Aches and pains, fever, really sore throat, headache and absolutely exhausted, I was so tired,” she said.
“I could sleep 12 hours, get up and have breakfast and then think, ‘I have got to go back to bed’.”
As her symptoms started to clear Amie thought she was on the mend, but her case took a turn for the worse in week three.
“I woke up one morning really struggling to breathe … I felt like I couldn’t breathe enough, that was the first time I was really scared,” she said.
“I called [my local public health unit] and they told me to go into emergency. I had a chest X-ray and some bloods taken. The X-ray show inflammation but no damage on my lungs, which was obviously the main concern. My bloods showed I was still fighting an infection.
“I was one of those people that thought: ‘I don’t know if this is as bad as they are making out’. I thought I would be fine, I guess. I generally consider myself to be quite healthy. I eat well, I exercise and I am busy all the time.
“But then having that experience with that breathing difficulty, it was a big wake up call. I thought ‘wow if I am quite healthy and that is what it did to me what is it going to do to anybody who has any other health issues at all?’”
Amie’s symptoms passed this week and she was given the all-clear by the doctor.
Finally, after three weeks in isolation, she has been reunited with her two children, who are five and eight.
“I surprised them. I didn’t tell them what time I would come pick them up. I just turned up at the door. I could hear them screaming ‘ahh mummy’ through the door,” she said.
“I think both have been stuck to my hip since they got here.”
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