Rebecca Frasure is finally home, ending her coronavirus ordeal by bending down to scratch her cat Quil after nearly two months on a cruise ship and then living in isolation as one of the first Americans known to contract COVID-19.

The Forest Grove woman, who is 35 and works for a medical health plan in Oregon, is also one of the first Americans known to recover from the new coronavirus.

Frasure left with her husband in January for an Asian cruise aboard the Diamond Princess and was diagnosed with the virus on Feb. 6. She spent nearly a month at a hospital in Tokyo after testing positive.

Her only symptoms were a light cough and a slight fever, she said. And those subsided with time, even as she kept testing positive for the virus.

Now, she wants people to know that while the new coronavirus certainly causes understandable anxiety, her experience was that it’s manageable. And isolation, while tough, is important.

“It prevented the spread,” she said. “It was no fun, for sure, but you know, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

Her symptoms were so mild, Frasure said, that had she not been tested by Japanese health officials, she wouldn’t have given her symptoms a second thought.

That changed when test after test showed she still had the virus. She was released from the hospital only after two back-to-back tests showed she was in the clear.

Frasure returned Tuesday to an Oregon that is in a profoundly different mood than when she left. Then, the disease was just a news item about some faraway country. Now, the state is in the throes of what could be Oregon’s own epidemic.

When Frasure got news of her illness, there were still no known COVID-19 cases in Oregon and no Americans had yet died. Now, Oregon health officials say there are probably hundreds of cases in the state, in addition to the 19 reported by Wednesday.

Across the world, more than 118,000 have fallen ill and 4,600 people have died. In the U.S., about 1,100 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and 31 have died, according to a New York Times database.

States are taking increasingly aggressive measures to stem the virus’s spread. Washington, which has been hardest hit by the spread of the disease, this week banned gatherings of more than 250 people, closed schools and enacted regulations limiting how many people can visit relatives in nursing homes.

Because of Frasure’s mild symptoms, her main struggle with the coronavirus was limited primarily to the isolation that she felt in Tokyo – not the disease itself.

What was toughest for her, she said, was not being able to be with her husband, Kent Frasure, who was quarantined on the cruise ship most of the time she was hospitalized. She said it also was hard to communicate with the hospital staff.

For Oregonians scared about the outbreak, Frasure urged basic protections – the same advice local, state and federal officials have been giving regularly: frequent handwashing and staying home if sick.

And for those who do get the virus, she said, it’s important to remember that the majority of illnesses are mild, her own infection being one such example.

More than 80 percent of cases have mild symptoms, according to a Chinese study that included nearly 45,000 confirmed cases.

Of even greater potential damage than the disease itself, she said, is panic that an epidemic can cause.

“You either approach it with fear, or you approach it with courage,” Frasure said. “And, you know, fear is never the way to go.”

-- Fedor Zarkhin

fzarkhin@oregonian.com

desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin

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