Intermountain marks 1 year since receiving the first COVID-19 patient

MURRAY – It was a year ago on Sunday that St. George resident Mark Jorgensen arrived at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray and became the first Utahn with a confirmed case of COVID-19 to be treated in the state .

Dr Todd Vento and Jorgensen of Intermountain appeared in a virtual meeting Sunday afternoon to discuss the birthday, Jorgensen’s experience with the coronavirus, and what doctors have learned about COVID-19 in the months following treatment. Vento, an infectious disease doctor who treated Jorgensen, said it was “hard to believe” that it had been a year since Jorgensen had arrived.

Jorgensen was a passenger on the Diamond Princess cruise ship which became a petri dish of coronavirus infections while cruising near Japan last year. His wife, Jerri, tested positive on the ship and was taken to a Japanese hospital. Mark Jorgensen was brought back from Japan by the US government and first tested positive for COVID-19 after landing in California.

A few days later, Jorgensen was airlifted to his original condition for treatment at Intermountain Medical Center. Jorgensen was then allowed to quarantine his home with his wife.

He never exhibited any symptoms of the virus.

Vento explained that at the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention required patients to test negative for COVID-19 before they could leave isolation. Jorgensen was locked in his home for weeks before the CDC changed his guidelines and he was released from solitary confinement in March 2020.

“I remember that phone call,” Vento said, “calling her… and then one day saying, ‘Hey, you’re free to come out of isolation. I remember telling him, “Wait, I’m still positive. I said, “That’s right, but now the CDC has a new approach.”

“I think the lesson is there, we are learning things,” Vento added. “We have to change, we have to adapt. People said not to use masks; it probably set us back a bit. Now we know the data is amazing for masks, and we have to use masks and we have to accept it. But you can see that when you have these steep learning curves early on, sometimes people will interpret it as, “Oh, maybe you don’t know what you’re doing. Well, the reality is we didn’t really do it. And why? We had a virus that we had never heard of, never seen, until December 2019. We had to learn very quickly. “

‘I don’t regret going at all’

Jorgensen said he believed he caught COVID-19 on the flight back to the United States.

“It was all a nightmare,” he recalls, recalling the “battle between the CDC, the State Department and the White House” over whether he and his fellow Americans should even be allowed to return.

“This plane trip was quite interesting,” he said. “Everyone was packed into that cargo plane, 747. I’m sure there was a transmission there.”

Jorgensen said it was a bit “confusing” to see the “noise” being made about him, as he had no symptoms.

“I felt great the whole time,” he said, but understands that “people were learning” about the virus and “what it was all about”.

Today, asymptomatic COVID-19 patients are generally advised to self-isolate at home for 10 days.

Jorgensen said the year since leaving solitary confinement had been “uneventful”. But he’s not sure he’s “skated freely” from COVID-19 as he once thought.

“I have a memory fog going on that I’m hearing is a symptom of it, and I’m wondering if that’s part of it,” Jorgensen said. He also had problems with his eyes that his ophthalmologist is “convinced” is related to.

Jorgensen said he had not yet received a coronavirus vaccine and wanted to “see how it goes” first, but will likely follow his doctor’s advice and get one eventually.

He said he didn’t regret setting sail on the Diamond Princess.

“I don’t live life that way,” he says. “I did what I did, and that’s what happened. … I don’t regret going at all. We had a great time, and we had a little side fling afterwards, and OK, that was what it was, and yes, I definitely plan on doing it again.

“I am currently in Costa Rica,” he said. “This is our first international trip since all of this. So obviously we don’t let that stop us afraid. It’s just kind of our philosophy in life.”

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