‘Stay in your rooms’: How a JoCo family self-quarantines after daughter’s Europe trip
When Katherine Riedel came home late Friday night after spending six weeks in Europe, she got no hug from Mom or Dad.
She still hasn’t.
Katherine can’t come within six feet of her parents.
This Overland Park household is in a self-imposed quarantine, a safety measure in case Katherine and her traveling companion were exposed to the new coronavirus overseas.
Katherine and her friend, Kacki Dreyer, will spend 24/7 holed up in two upstairs bedrooms while her parents stay put in the rest of the house. Conversations will be held from a distance or by group text.
By the time they got back to Kansas, Katherine’s mother had set down rules as detailed as a general’s battle plan, beginning with this: “Girls stay in your rooms as much as possible.”
You touch a door handle, knob or light switch, you wipe it down. (“You don’t realize how much stuff you touch until you have to wipe down everything,” Katherine told The Star by phone.)
You need to cough or sneeze? Direct it into your elbow — that goes without saying.
Take vitamins every day.
And under no circumstance can the young women touch Domino and Jellybean, the family cats, who are sitting outside Katherine’s bedroom meowing and wondering what the heck is going on.
Katherine’s mom told them to avoid the cats because there’s conflicting information about whether animals can get or transmit the virus.
All these special instructions are taped to doors around the house, and the women have copies in their rooms.
Operation Self-Quarantine is underway.
‘Not leaving our house for the next two weeks’
Denise Riedel, Katherine’s mother, told her Facebook friends on Friday she’s disappearing for a while.
“Many of you know our daughter Katherine has been on a grand adventure for the past six weeks. When she graduated from KU she gifted herself an incredible trip to Europe. Eleven countries in 40 days,” she wrote.
“She and her friend who’s been with her both feel fine. They have no symptoms. They have no reason to believe they’ve been exposed to Covid-19. But they are going to self-quarantine at our house for two weeks. That means I will not be leaving our house for the next two weeks.
“I know many other people who are voluntarily staying in for a couple of weeks. We are all doing this to try to help prevent the spread of this virus.”
Katherine and Kacki, who are both 23, left for Europe on Feb. 4. They graduated in December from the University of Kansas with several degrees between them, both in mechanical engineering. The trip was “something fun to celebrate ourselves,” said Katherine.
Her mom said she wasn’t concerned about the trip since the itinerary didn’t include places that had been hit yet by the virus.
The women saw Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, Munich, Barcelona, Florence, Interlaken in Switzerland, Morocco, too.
But things changed in Italy.
No hand sanitizer, no masks
Another friend who spent part of the trip with them started to feel sick in Florence. A doctor diagnosed her with strep throat. While in a pharmacy, the women bought bottles of hand sanitizer.
“I really wished we had bought more because that’s the last time we saw hand sanitizer,” Katherine said.
On Feb. 24, while in Rome, they started hearing about a coronavirus outbreak in Milan, about 300 miles away, “which made us feel a little better, but that’s when we started to get nervous,” said Katherine.
“Once we got out of Italy,” Kacki said, “we thought we’d be fine.”
They did not travel to northern Italy, the epicenter of the European outbreak, where 16 million people were quarantined last week.
They watched coronavirus fear grip Rome as people started wearing masks in public. They got worried, too.
From that point on, they couldn’t find masks, hand sanitizers or wipes anywhere.
“At that point, Katherine and I were about ready to go home,” said Kacki.
They were meeting a lot of American study abroad students who were being called home by their universities, and at first they thought that was overkill.
But Kacki’s parents raised the prospect of a self-quarantine when they got home.
“My mom has auto-immune issues, and when we were in Barcelona she texted me and said, ‘Hey, it looks like they’re telling people to self-isolate,’” said Kacki, who lives in Leawood. “A couple of days later my dad said, ‘We think we’re going to make you self-quarantine.’ I said there’s no way.”
Kacki said she couldn’t return to her own home because her father owns a company that cleans medical facilities and was told he could not enter those buildings if he had been in the same house with someone who had recently traveled overseas.
The Riedels started talking about self-quarantine as well.
Currently, the CDC is asking travelers to stay home for 14 days from the time they’ve left an area where the virus is spreading widely through the community.
Those countries include China, Iran, South Korea and a growing list of European countries, including Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Spain, Switzerland and Italy — several of which Katherine and Kacki visited.
Recommendations for travelers are changing frequently. On Sunday, Kansas health officials recommended a 14-day home quarantine for anyone who has traveled to areas in the U.S. and abroad where the virus is widespread.
“We haven’t had any symptoms, but I don’t really want to be the reason that someone gets coronavirus,” said Katherine. “I really don’t want anything to happen because of me.”
With two days left in Paris, they went into a pharmacy, bought thermometers and started using them. Fever, cough and shortness of breath are coronavirus symptoms.
“I will forever have a thermometer that only takes a temperature in Celsius,” said Katherine, who is used to America’s Fahrenheit. “That’s why we have Google.”
Consulting the CDC
Her mom heard the president on Wednesday announce a temporary ban on travel from Europe beginning at midnight Friday.
She, like so many others, was confused and worried.
She and many of her daughter’s friends blew up Katherine’s cellphone with more than 100 texts after the president spoke.
“Oh my god can you come home?” people asked.
“So that’s when we started planning,” Riedel said.
After the president’s speech caused reported chaos at European airports, the White House clarified that the ban did not apply to U.S. citizens coming home, like Katherine and Kacki.
Riedel called her primary care physician, who directed her to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website for quarantine information.
She knew Katherine and Kacki were taking their temperatures and showed no signs of illness, but “we decided we would stay at home and do all those things,” said Riedel.
She also consulted a physician friend who shared the United Kingdom’s even more stringent instructions for self-quarantine and began to customize a plan.
How would they keep the women contained to an area of the house without exposing her and her husband? That was a concern, though neither are in the high-risk category — over 60 with underlying health conditions.
She decided to have Katherine and her friend stay in two upstairs bedrooms that share a bathroom.
How would they do all that laundry after do many weeks of travel?
The UK safety guidelines suggested wearing a plastic apron, a mask and gloves while washing the clothes of an infected person. “Well, we don’t have any aprons,” said Riedel.
The first time Kacki brought her laundry downstairs, Riedel and her husband stayed two rooms away.
They put a dorm-sized refrigerator in Katherine’s room and brought a microwave and Keurig coffee machine down from the attic.
Riedel set up tables outside each bedroom where she leaves meals; Kacki’s mom is bringing food, too. “We’re really, really, really trying to be super-vigilant about us not coming in contact with them,” she said.
The women are using disposable plates and cups and silverware — Happy Birthday, Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day plates from Riedel’s well-stocked paper goods stash. (A run on toilet paper? No worries here. This mom always has plenty.)
After Riedel shared the details of their isolation on Facebook, friends left thanks and offers of help.
“If you need anything delivered that you run out of let me know.”
“Thank you for helping the girls self quarantine. As a person at high risk I really appreciate y’all taking this seriously.”
“Thank you! My medically fragile parents thank you and wish more people understood how important this can be.”
“The truth is we’re not the only ones doing this,” said Riedel. “There are lots of people across the United States who are taking precautions like this.”
To people calling the coronavirus a hoax, she says: “I believe in science and I believe in scientists. And I trust what they say. I am very careful about vetting my news sources so I am only reading things from legitimate, verifiable news sources.
“I don’t want to panic about this either. But … I think we are all better off if we err on the side of caution.”
She has family members who are elderly and have health issues. “I would not in a million years want to inadvertently expose any of them to something I can prevent,” she said. “And I also don’t want to expose you or a stranger at the grocery store or gym to something I can prevent.
“So if we are blowing this out of proportion, I think that is a better alternative than not taking it seriously enough.”
March 27
Back when the women first booked their flights, they scored seats for the return trip with few other passengers around them. But the flight ended up being full of Americans who thought they needed to try to beat the new travel ban.
They flew from Paris to Detroit to Kansas City and say that nowhere along the way did anyone take their temperature, ask where they’d traveled or ask if they’d been around anyone showing symptoms of the coronavirus.
“I wanted them to take my temperature,” said Katherine. “I wanted to know if anyone on my flight had a temperature. I heard some guy behind me in Paris say he purposefully bought a ticket to get back (that day) to avoid a potential quarantine.
“That’s the problem. Those are the same people who are going to say, ‘Whatever.’ Why would you be bragging about that? I want to know if I’m going to be healthy.”
Worried about using Uber to get home from the airport and potentially exposing a driver, a special pickup was devised.
Kacki’s parents drove their car and hers to Kansas City International Airport, dropped hers off outside baggage claim, then waved to their daughter and Katherine from a safe distance.
“They couldn’t help us carry anything. They were watching us carrying 80 pounds of luggage,” Kacki joked.
Within the first 24 hours of isolation, everyone sounded upbeat and not the least bit bored. Yet.
Riedel has plans to work on her scrapbooking, watch a couple of Netflix series, read and work on home improvement projects.
She is not looking forward to spending time away from her 4-year-old granddaughter.
The quarantined travelers plan to watch a lot of TV and Netflix, text friends and hang out on Snapchat.
Katherine already had a Skype date with her boyfriend in Washington, D.C.
“It feels real good to be home again,” Katherine said. “For me and Kacki, we basically spent every minute together for 40 days. I think we’re both relieved to have our own space.”
They can go outside if they keep their distance from other people — go for a run, sit on the patio — and Kacki knows she’ll probably wind up driving around in her car and cranking up the music.
“Kacki and I have talked about driving out to Shawnee Mission Park and hanging out in a field by ourselves,” Katherine said.
Neither one of the weary travelers can wait to wrap their arms around their parents again. If all goes well, they know just when that will happen.
They get sprung on March 27.
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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