WILBRAHAM – One Wilbraham native has a view of the COVID-19 crisis from the perspective of two countries.

Carla Valentine, the former managing editor for Reminder Publishing, has spent much of the last 18 years in Italy as an English instructor and tour guide and recently returned to the United States to be closer with her family who now lives in Maine.

“My family was concerned about me being in Italy but it’s everywhere. There’s no escaping,” she said.

Valentine describes herself as a “presumptive positive case.” Her roommate was positive for the virus and despite social distancing and stringent cleaning, Valentine developed mild symptoms. She still has no sense of taste or smell.

She managed to avoid the disease in Italy to confront it here.

What concerns her is that because she did not enter into the healthcare system, she is not being counted as having the virus.

“Since I probably have it, but don’t qualify for a test, I’m, not a ‘case.’ How many more are like me?” she asked.

She continued, “Had it not been for the fact that I lost my senses of taste and smell, I would not have called the hospital.”

Valentine does not have a primary care physician and believes she has no health care insurance coverage. This is a big difference from living in a country for years that has universal health coverage, she noted.

She said at the beginning of March there grew awareness of the virus in Italy. The government attempted to contain the virus in the north of the country where it was prevalent. Many people compared it to the flu she said and wondered what was the concerns.

She said in her English class she altered the Italian habit of kissing people on both cheeks as a greeting and started doing the elbow bump.

“Everybody got a big laugh out of that,” she said. She also placed a large bottle of hand sanitizer on her desk for people to use.

“We really didn’t know if we should be concerned about it or not,” she recalled.

With the spread of the disease and the death toll among the elderly rising, Valentine saw changes in attitude.

”Each day it was something new,” she said. There were a series of orders from the government about which businesses were open and the implementation of social distancing.

“It’s this constant change you start to feel unsettled through your entire life,” she explained.

She started wiping down surfaces “religiously every day.”

By the time she flew out of Italy on March 24, people were told don’t go to a grocery store unless necessary and stop such activities such as jogging or going to a park.

“Coming back to the United States I’ve already been through a rough boot camp,” she said.

Although her family believed she wasn’t safe in Italy, Valentine disagreed. A resident of Rome, she felt more secure because she had healthcare and access to “the best hospital in Europe for infectious disease.”

She is concerned that people here have difficulty getting to test to confirm their status.

Valentine noted that only now Italians are expressing concern about the nation’s economy. The culture is radically different than this country, she explained. The average Italian doesn’t invest in the stock market and they don’t use credit cards. They are savers, she said. They also don’t sell their homes frequently. Instead a house is passed down in the family. There are not problems with student loans.

She added families tend to stay together, which means they have a built-in support network.

Valentine’s original plan was to continue working in the summer for a Rhode Island-based company that provides tours of the United States and teach English in Italy in the winter. Now she is worried about the status of the tourism history here and how quickly it might return.

She noted it’s not possible to practice social distancing on a tour bus that holds 50 people.

She is now looking into on-line training jobs and considering her options.