DANBURY, Conn — Tuesday marks two years since it was announced the first Connecticut resident tested positive for COVID-19.
It has been a long two years since then, with close to 728,000 cases recorded to date and more than 10,000 deaths in Connecticut alone.
The first patient was a man from Wilton in his 40s who was treated at Danbury Hospital.
"Probably the most vivid 72 hours of my life, I remember quite a bit of that," said Dr. Paul Nee, a "Being down in the ED, in the room about getting him up to our step-down unit and all the doctors and nurses that were there."
Dr. Nee and his team were forced to navigate the unknows at the start of the pandemic as they treated initial patients.
"It was supplemental oxygen and supportive treatment, and that's what we did at that point and very early on, what we would do was we would get to a certain level of oxygen requirement and then move to the ventilator, and those were sort of our parameters early on. We look back on that and we learned a lot in that first month of March just about COVID and how to handle it," said Dr. Nee.
Two years later, Dr. Nee is thankful for all the advances, including increased testing, vaccines and therapeutics.
"Being here at Danbury Hospital, I've said it before, I'm so proud to work here because the staff here, everyone works so hard, really took good care of that patient and really overcame their own fear and had the courage to step forward and do things. We didn't know a lot then. We were learning, we knew not much about it. We had to learn as we went along," said Dr. Nee.
Angelo Bavaro is an anchor and reporter at FOX61 News. He can be reached at abavaro@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
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