Former NHLer who battled virus says don’t underestimate COVID-19
Blake Wesley thought he was immune from COVID-19 – until he found out the hard way that he wasn’t.
“I’ve had pneumonia, I’ve had bronchitis – you can intensify that by ten times,” the 61-year-old Red Deer native said Monday from Sankt Pölten, Austria, where he’s working at a hockey academy.
“I took a lot of precautions from the time I left North America in August,” he told rdnewsNOW. “We were wearing masks on the airplane and in the airports, restaurants and public places, (doing) proper sanitization, no handshaking, no hugging or physical contact, (practicing) physical distancing. And then I get here and we still practiced really good habits.”
He began feeling symptoms – including headache, racing heartbeat, nausea and loss of appetite – on Oct. 2 and initially shrugged it off to stress and fatigue.