Aurora Sanchez noticed her mother, Maria Ocampo, was sick with what would later be diagnosed as the new coronavirus March 25.
Sanchez first realized something was wrong when she tried to wake up a sleeping Ocampo in the mother’s Bakersfield home, and felt the 86-year-old “burning up.” A thermometer would reveal Ocampo had a temperature of 104 degrees, and soon after being woken she began hallucinating and saying things that didn’t make sense.
That’s when Sanchez says she screamed to her sister for help. Ocampo was rushed to the hospital, where she spent three days before returning home.
Her illness has required Sanchez and two of her sisters to be quarantined at her mother’s house until symptoms of COVID-19 reside. Under normal circumstances, Ocampo would be isolated within the home to prevent the spread of the virus or a re-transmission to the elderly woman.
