Life is like "The Twilight Zone" for Victoria and Jose Galan. Outside their room window are crews in full hazmat suits, tasked with disinfecting everything they touch and to keep them fed.
The Coral Gables couple is now on day seven of 14 in quarantine at Dobbins Air Reserve Base outside of Atlanta.
“It’s a testament of wills and power of the mind," Victoria said. "And all we have to do is entertain ourselves, we are stuck with entertaining ourselves, lots of people just walk, sit down and read a book. Weather has been ugly but still better than being in your room.”
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Two hundred people are with them in quarantine, required to wear a mask whenever they go outside. Every day is a struggle to stay active, stay sharp and fill time.
Victoria tries to spend as much time outside as possible in a fenced-off area doing yoga and exercise. She says she had to mentally give in to the situation.
“We’re not in control and once we gave over to that, it made this whole process a whole lot easier," she said. "We’re not in control right now but nobody is out there, once we did that it made it easier.”
What does Victoria miss the most? She says it's sitting on her couch and watching TV and opening her fridge to get a snack, whenever she wants.
“It’s just surreal, we are really desperate to get home, we’re at that point where every day we’re like again? We’re here again? We’d love to self-quarantine in our house," Victoria said.
The couple says the accommodations at the air base are actually a step up from isolation on the Grand Princess ship, where this whole ordeal started. Passengers fell ill with coronavirus and the couple was confined to their room for six days, along with 3,500 others. The ship was transferred from the ship to the air base last Wednesday.
“It was a very surreal moment, people who hadn’t been moving their bodies in their cabins were falling," Victoria said. "It was a very bizarre feeling to have been locked up, no fresh air and then out.”
Both were tested for COVID-19. If the results are negative, they can go home in three to five days.
The couple wants their story to motivate the rest of the country to self-isolate to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
“It’s so precious that we have to take it seriously," Victoria said. "We have to make it a priority, it has to be important to everybody, even if you’re not sick, even if you are young, it’s bigger than us.”
