A Florida man didn’t buy into the seriousness of COVID-19 until he and his wife tested positive for the virus, NBC News reports.
Brian Hitchens, a rideshare driver, made multiple posts on Facebook discrediting the coronavirus in March and April, at one point calling it “a fake crisis.”
"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," he wrote on April 2. "Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords."
Then, in mid-April, the 46-year-old revealed that he and his wife began feeling ill.
"Been home sick for over a week. Both my wife and I home sick," he wrote in a post on April 18. "I've got no energy and all I want to do is sleep." He and his wife were admitted to a hospital the next day.
On May 12, Hitchens said that he thought COVID-19 was "blown out of proportion" and "wasn’t that serious." He wrote that when he and his wife became ill, he "had just enough energy" to drive them to the hospital on April 19, where they both took tests confirming they had the virus.
"They admitted us right away and we both went to ICU,”"he wrote. "I started feeling better within a few days but my wife got worse to the point where they sedated her and put her on the ventilator." At that point, he had been hospitalized for three weeks. He still had the virus and had pneumonia in his lungs.
"As of today my wife is still sedated and on the ventilator with no signs of improving," Hitchens wrote. "There were a couple times were they tried to start weaning her off the ventilator but as soon as they've done that her oxygen level dropped and they had to put her back on the ventilator full time."
Hitchens explained that he had come to terms with the fact that his wife might die. "This thing is nothing to be messed with please listen to the authorities and heed the advice of the experts," he added. "We don't have to fear this and by heeding the advice doesn't mean that you fear it that means you're showing wisdom during this epidemic time."
He then expressed his regret for not taking the virus seriously. “Looking back I should have wore a mask in the beginning but I didn't and perhaps I'm paying the price for it now," he explained, adding that if he did get his wife sick, he knows that she and God forgive him.
On Monday, Hitchens wrote another note to his “haters”:
“I am negative! Praise the Lord!”, which sounds like he has since tested negative for the virus.
