MOUNT VERNON — Some good news concerning COVID-19 is always welcome, and it came Wednesday evening from Knox Public Health spokesperson Pam Palm pertaining to the Mount Vernon Nazarene University community.
“All eight Knox County residents who were on the MVNU trip to Italy have been cleared, and are no longer being quarantined,” she said via text.
Eight Knox County residents, four students and four adults including MVNU Art Professor John Donnelly, were on MVNU’s “Be Charmed by Italy” trip Feb. 22 through March 4, went into self-quarantine on their return.
KPH, following MVNU’s decision to self-quarantine all 28 people on the trip, 19 of them MVNU students, kept in touch with the eight in Knox County each day for the past 14 days, asking them to take their temperatures and self-monitor for any COVID-19 symptoms. The 20 on the trip not residing in Knox County were asked to do the same with county health officials where they reside.
At first, those daily check-ins, most involving Lisa Dudgeon, Knox Public Health director of nursing, were done once a day. They were later changed to twice a day.
In a previous story in the News, Donnelly said the trip to Italy, MVNU’s 13th since 1995, could not have gone better. Students were offered a 3-credit class, “Art and Architecture in Historical Italy.” They landed in Milan and progressed to Venice, then Bologna and southward to stops in Florence, Assisi, Rome, Vatican City and other locales.
Though the group landed in Milan — the main city in the northern region of Lombardy where the COVID-19 virus later infected thousands — Donnelly said the group was literally always one step ahead of what was happening behind them. When they first arrived in Italy Feb. 22, he said, little was mentioned of the virus outside of a cruise ship where passengers had been infected off the coast of Italy. By about the midway point of their trip, however, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued a Level 3 travel warning, requesting no non-essential travel to Italy.
Donnelly called it, ironically, the best trip any Italy group has had at MVNU where health is concerned, with not one of the 28 trip takers getting even mildly sick.
As of Sunday, there were 24,747 COVID-19 cases reported throughout Italy, with 1,809 deaths — with 368 of those deaths reported in the most recent 24-hour period, an increase of 25 percent.
