A doctor who attended a conference on emergency medicine in New York City tested positive for COVID-19 days after attending the event.
The Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine held a conference the week of March 8 featuring hundreds of doctors and medical school professionals. Rosny Daniel, a 32-year-old emergency room doctor from San Francisco, attended the weeklong conference.
On Friday, Daniel started to feel ill and took a test for the coronavirus. He tested positive for the illness and was racked with guilt at the idea that he or another attendee could have spread the disease to a room full of doctors who headed home to start treating patients.
“We absolutely didn’t know what was happening, nor where this was going to strike,” Daniel said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “Everyone there, we’re all people who care about the health and well-being of our communities. We just happened to have terrible, terrible timing.”
Daniel explained that he reached out to the conference and notified them about the potential outbreak shortly after finding out his test results. He said that doctors who attended the conference were aware of the coronavirus cases in New York but did not think the disease would spread rapidly if good hygiene was practiced.
“There was more hand sanitizer than I’ve ever seen at a conference,” he noted, adding, “I was already paranoid. Friends I was with started to make fun of me for being paranoid. But Tuesday, we were all like, ‘Holy shit.’”
That Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the New York City suburb of New Rochelle had been placed under lockdown to curb the spread of the illness.
“I was like, ‘I can’t be here anymore,’” Daniel said. “’I want to be at home. I don’t want to be in contact with anybody.’”
He flew back to San Francisco on Wednesday and self-quarantined while at home but returned to work Thursday morning. By Thursday night, he started showing symptoms of the disease, and his test on Friday revealed he was positive.
“I’ve worn all the proper personal protective equipment at work in the past weeks, but I live in a city, and I’ve been to the grocery store, the pharmacy. My best guess is I probably picked it up in New York, but I don’t know,” he said.
Daniel turned to social media to warn as many people as possible about his illness in a Medium post. He explained, “My concern is that if people are quiet about this, it’s just going to get worse.”
So far, more than 196,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally, and more than 7,800 have died. Nearly 81,000 people have recovered from the illness since testing positive after the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, in December.
