Take it from him

Let's take a little trip to Palm Beach, FLA, where a fella by the name of Brian Lee Hitchens is in the hospital, one of tens of thousands in this world recovering from the coronavirus.  From his bed at the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, he's telling reporters that he used to be a big skeptic on the topic of the disease that laid him low.

He can't figure out how people can't understand that the virus is a real danger to people's health, even though he used to be one of those non-believers.

“To these protestors I say, how did I go to the ER and test positive? How can I make that up?” he asks.

“I didn’t test myself. This isn’t a made-up thing.”

You might have met Hitchens if you've been to Palm Beach; he's a driver for Lyft and Uber. Right now, he's not driving anywhere except for wheeling down to the occupational therapy room in the hospital. He's coming along, getting better, but he'll still be down for a while.

Worse yet, his wife is in critical condition in the same hospital, on a ventilator, with the coronavirus.

He told the newspaper down there that he thought at first that the virus was no problem. He says this happened because he "heard so many different things that it was unclear what was real and what wasn’t.”

On April 2, he posted on his Facebook that "I’m honoring what our government says to do during this epidemic, but I do not fear this virus because I know that my God is bigger than this Virus will ever be.”

So he figured, why wear a mask and take certain precautions?

So it came to pass that a week into the shutdown, it dawned on him that he and his wife should wear masks when they went out.

But that was too late, it would seem.

He and his wife started with the symptoms at the same time ("I started to feel out of breath, like I ran a 10-mile marathon or something. My energy was zapped. I was so tired and lethargic") and his wife couldn't keep food down. Hitchens thought it was a cold or flu, but he knew worse was happening soon.

His April 18 Facebook: “Been home sick for over a week. Both my wife and I home sick. I’ve got no energy and all I want to do is sleep.”

He's still in the hospital waiting for a second negative test before they will send him home. He has only seen his wife once, when he was being wheeled from room to room and passed hers.

It's sad that it took such a dangerous few weeks to bring Hitchens to this revelation.  But he has this to share with non-believers and "Re-Open" agitators:

"I want to encourage people to comply, because this is a plague and we have to be careful."

His words.