Corazón magazine journalist Pilar Vidal came to vacation at a resort in Punta Cana, entering on 13 January 2020. Now it is known, she could have been the first case of coronavirus in the Dominican Republic. In an interview for the Spanish TV program “Espejo Público” on Atresmedia network in Spain, she said she showed the first symptoms of the disease just two days after beginning her vacation here.
“I remember coming down with what looked like a typical cold and the next day, I began to notice that the food didn’t taste good to me, that I was coughing a lot and had a fever,” she said in the video, while interviewed by Susana Grisso.
On her second day in Punta Cana, she said she had trouble breathing when having lunch with her travel companion, a surgeon. “I’m drowning, I can’t talk,” she remembers telling her partner. When they took the flight back to Spain on the 23rd of the same month, Vidal said that she did not let anyone sleep on the plane because of her by then severe cough.
When asked by one of the interviewers about the protection she used once returning, Vidal replied that then the use of masks was null since there was no information about the spread of the virus.
After arriving to Spain she went to a hospital where she was diagnosed with an infection. She was given antibiotics, an x-ray and a blood test. Eventually, she recovered.
She explained that at the time, the medics did not know about Covid-19. Her doctors now have told her that the illness she had in January was the coronavirus.
In the Dominican Republic, the first official case of the coronavirus was reported on 1 March 2020. It was an Italian tourist staying in Dominicus, an eastern beach area. While pretty much recovered, the man still tests positive for the disease and hasn’t yet been discharged from the Ramón de Lara Hospital at the San Isidro Air Base. The Ramón de Lara was the first hospital to treat Covid-19 cases in the country.
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21 April 2020