Dear Corona Diary: German patient gives updates on Twitter

BERLIN (AP) — On the fifth day after she fell ill with COVID-19 respiratory disease, Karoline Preisler could breathe again without wincing through severe pain in her chest.

But the 48-year-old from a small town in northeastern Germany was still sick and very weak. She had slept only three hours the night before in a hospital isolation ward. She worried constantly about her husband and three children.

“I miss my children so badly. They miss me, and we all miss that we can’t hug each other anymore,” Preisler said in a phone interview on Monday.

Preisler, who practices law and is a local politician in the Baltic Sea town of Barth, started experiencing symptoms a few hours after she tested positive for the new coronavirus last week. Her husband, a federal lawmaker, had tested positive earlier and been told to remain isolated in Berlin, a 299-kilometer drive (186 miles) away,

The couple's 9-year-old twins and 11-year-old tested negative, but health authorities ordered the children quarantined at home with their mother. When Preisler's symptoms worsened and she needed to be hospitalized on Saturday, her husband was permitted to go back to Barth to care for the children.

Lonely, frightened and unwell, Preisler turned to the internet for information from other patients but didn't find many first-hand accounts of living with and fighting the virus. So she decided to share her experience on Twitter, where she had about 5,000 followers.

Using the hashtag #coronatagebuch, German for #coronadiary, Preisler has given frequent updates on her condition. She posted photos of herself with hollow eyes and her lower face masked., images of cleaning staff in protective gear removing contaminated clothes from her hospital room and another selfie showing her receiving oxygen...