CORONAVIRUS ONE YEAR LATER – THE GREAT ESCAPE
PART 1 OF 2
One year ago, Kerry and Lori Hofer and their four young children were just days into what may have been the first quarantine related to coronavirus the Freeman area had seen.
The Hofers had been in Europe but were forced to return to the United States earlier than planned, finding themselves in a frantic race against time amidst escalating concerns about the spread and threat of COVID-19.
Their plane landed at Sioux Falls Regional Airport late Sunday, March 15 after a 22-hour day, and within hours they were cozy together inside their West Freeman home, where they would isolate for another 14 days.
It was the end of an adventure they won’t forget and the beginning of a long and strange year that they’ll forever remember.
It was March 9, 2020, and the Hofers had just returned from a long weekend excursion in Vienna, Austria — a three-hour train ride from Budejovice, a city in the southern region of the Czech Republic where Lori was on sabbatical through her work as an associate professor of business at Mt. Marty University.
The couple had been distantly aware of the growing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic but hadn’t seen any direct effects of it in the areas of Europe they had been (although Italy saw an outbreak not long after the Hofers had spent 12 days in Paris and Rome). In fact, the entire Czech Republic had just 40 confirmed cases, and none were in the city in which they had been living.
Given all of that, there wasn’t much concern upon the Hofer’s return from Vienna to their small apartment in Budejovice on March 9 of last year.
But the following morning they learned of a strong indicator that things may be taking a turn for the worse when the Czech Ministry of Health announced that all schools, universities and other events where more than 100 people were present would be closed immediately. That included the University of South Bohemia, where Lori had been lecturing and had just started the research portion of her sabbatical — studying the difference between accounting standards in the United States and those used across Europe. The move by the Ministry of Health wasn’t reactive, but rather proactive.
“We want to stress to everyone back home that this isn’t because there’s an epidemic here,” Lori wrote in a March 10 Facebook post. “They are taking sweeping measures in an effort to prevent what’s happening in Italy.”
Lori says nobody knew at the time whether this would be a short-term or long-term shutdown in the Czech Republic and what it would mean for the remaining portion of her sabbatical, “but we are really hoping the situation doesn’t get out of hand,” she wrote. “So for now we’ll continue to enjoy our apartment, the town and the last three weeks of this crazy ride. We appreciate your prayers and will plan to come home coronavirus-free on our scheduled April 1st flight.”
Kerry and Lori and their children — Cadence, 11 at the time; Reeslyn, 9; Jaimson, 6; and Kendric, 3 — ended up returning home coronavirus-free, alright, but it wasn’t on April 1. And it wasn’t in any way they could have possibly imagined.
Like the rest of those back home in the United States, little could the Hofers know what was coming — that the worst global pandemic in 100 years would quickly alter plans, expectations, perspectives and ways of life, not for weeks or even months, but for the next 365 days.
Last year’s late-winter trip to Europe was a once-in-a-life time opportunity for Lori professionally, but was also a thrill on a personal level. The opportunity to mix businesses with pleasure, and for her family to experience and see the attractions of some of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world, was nothing short of a blessing.
“So fortunate,” Lori said. “This was the pinnacle of my career; sabbatical is something that is not offered very often at a university like Mt. Marty.”
The application process went back two years, she said, and included reviews by the board, the president and the vice president of academics. That she was finally granted the sabbatical was such a thrill that Lori says she wasn’t about to let those first reports of the coronavirus outbreak in China get in the way of her excitement.
“It was not my reality,” said Lori, who works at Mt. Marty with a man who is from the Wuhan area and whose parents still live there. “I would hear about it and what his parents could and couldn’t do, but I never connected what he was saying every day to anything that had to do with me.
“I had zero awareness that it might impact us or was not willing to accept that it might impact us,” she said. “We were in the head space of, this is where we’re going and we’re going to live it up.”
Europe was everything the Hofer family could have hoped for as they chose to spend a tourist adventure ahead of Lori’s sabbatical — three days in Paris and another three in Bordeaux before arriving in Italy on a night train on Feb. 11, where Lori would begin the lecture portion of her sabbatical. The Hofer children agree that Italy was the best part of the trip (although Kendric gives the nod to the airport).
Lori got a number of her mid-week lectures in before the Ministry of Health closed down the schools.
“That’s when things just seemed to explode,” says Kerry.
“I was working on a lecture I had the following day and I remember Kerry coming in to me with his phone, looking at the news and saying, ‘Honey, before you pour your heart and soul into that lecture, you’re going to want to look at this.’ Czech schools shut down.”
Hofer, who had two lectures left to give and then nearly all her research, said she took the news surprisingly well; “The writing must have been on the wall more than I realized, because Kerry had been looking at the numbers,” she said. “It’s like I was shocked, but yet I wasn’t. I was immediately grateful for what I had gotten in. I loved the lectures.”
While the news came as a curve ball, it didn’t immediately generate concern. As Lori’s Facebook post on Tuesday, March 10 clearly stated, the Hofers had no plans to come home early.
“I remember we were like, ‘OK, I don’t have to work, we have free housing here at the University, we’re going to keep enjoying Europe by going to places that are safe,’” says Lori, who remembers finding airfare to London for $60 and suggested the family throw a few things in backpacks and take off. “Kerry was like, ‘What if we can’t get back to our stuff?’”
“I remember saying that we’re not leaving here without everything,” Kerry says. “There was no way around that.”
“The next day I was like, ‘OK, you’re right,’” says Lori. “Kerry took on the role of responsible, concerned parent and I assumed the role of, ‘gonna make the best of this.’ The pinnacle of my career had just gotten hijacked. But Kerry knew; he had been watching. I was there working and he was there watching the world be taken over.”
The Hofers never did make that trip to London — “Thank the Lord,” says Lori.
Just like back home in the United States, concern escalated quickly that second week of March. Lori had gotten the news about the schools shutting down on Tuesday of that week and, by Thursday, March 12, shops were beginning to shut down. The Hofers remember a quick trip to Cesky Krumlov that day — a beautiful tourist town about 30 minutes by bus from where they were living,
“It was lovely,” says Kerry. “But they were like, ‘We’re closing though.’
Not only were the shops at Cesky Krumlov beginning to close, but the Hofers learned that all restaurants would be closing at 7 p.m. that night. So, after returning to their apartment and getting their kids settled in, Kerry and Lori headed out for one last outing at a local pub.
“It was weird because they were out of Czech beer,” Lori recalls. “We are in the beer capital of the world and they were out of beer. And we were like, ‘OK, something’s really off here.’ The next morning, on Friday the 13th, the Hofers woke to the news that the Czech Republic would be closing its borders at midnight.
“We knew we had to leave our country,” Lori says. “But we didn’t know where to go.”
Calls from Kerry to the US Embassy that had started already on Thursday were finally answered early Friday afternoon, but the Czech voice on the other end of the phone spoke only broken English and the conversation was very difficult.
“I’m like, ‘I’m an American citizen, I need to talk to an American and I need to talk to an American now;’ I was very insistent about it,” says Kerry. “Finally, he found somebody for me and I said I was here with my wife and kids; what do I need to do?
“And she said, ‘Our recommendation is to get back to America and get back as soon as you can.’”
