A former coronavirus skeptic is now warning others to take the pandemic seriously after being hospitalized with his wife.
Brian Hitchens, a Florida-based ride-share driver, had previously taken to social media to claim that the pandemic was blown out of proportion, but he changed his mind after he and his wife contracted the virus.
Listen to Hitchens' warning below:In an interview with WPTV-TV from his hospital bed at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center in Jupiter, Hitchins said: "I don't want to see anyone go through what I went through."
Hitchins admitted that prior to his diagnosis, he was skeptical about the scale of the pandemic and didn't think the problem was real.
He said: "I thought it was maybe the government trying something, and it was kind of like they threw it out there to kinda distract us.
"I'd get up in the morning and pray and trust in God for his protection, and I'd just leave it at that. There were all these masks and gloves. I thought it looks like a hysteria."
Taking to Facebook at the start of April, Hitchins wrote: "I do not fear this virus because I know that my God is bigger than this Virus will ever be."
But now in a lengthy post written at the start of this week, Hitchins changed his mind and wrote: "please use wisdom and don't be foolish like I was so the same thing won't happen to you, like it happened to me and my wife."
A month prior to his change of heart Hitchins, fell unwell, and his wife began to experience symptoms shortly afterward. They then self-isolated before the pair began to feel "worse and worse and worse" before they went to the hospital.
Hitchins and his wife required treatment in intensive care, and his wife remains on a ventilator at the time of writing, causing him to admit "this wasn't some scare tactic that anybody was using".
Hitchins now says that he is feeling "a lot better", but his wife has shown "no signs of improving". "My wife has been sick before in the past quite a few times and she always fought through to get better, but now after three weeks I have come to accept that my wife may pass away," Hitchens wrote on Facebook.
Hitchins concluded his Facebook post by writing "listen to the authorities and heed the advice of the experts", before adding that he "should have wore a mask in the beginning".
Per the John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, at the time of writing, there have been 4,648,785 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide, and a global death toll of 312,029.