Coronavirus: Okanagan teen relieved to be back in Canada after visiting ‘surreal’ Italy

Clark Coombs is relieved to be back home in the Okanagan after flying home from Europe last week.

“It’s really amazing,” he told Global News.

Coombs, 18, spent the last three months in Italy, where the death toll from the coronavirus has now surpassed 13,000, the highest number of fatalities in the world.

“It’s just unbelievable that a virus could do such a thing,” Coombs said.

Coombs was modeling in Milan, the capital of the Lombardy region, where 458 people died from COVID-19 on Monday alone.

He’s now self-isolating at home for 14 days.

“I’ve got another week,” he said. “I’m probably just going to stay inside for a couple more weeks anyway. There’s no point in going out.”

Coombs is taking his quarantine seriously, having just watched the situation in Italy go from bad to worse firsthand.

“It was very surreal, quite unbelievable,” he said.

1:55 Coronavirus outbreak: Italy’s small town priest handling death on industrial scale

He said people still went about their regular business, even when the coronavirus started making big headlines .

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“Nobody really took it seriously,” he said.

“Nobody really paid attention to it, so everybody was going outside, doing their daily thing until people started getting arrested and getting fines.”

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That’s when he said people finally got the message to stay home.

“I think the biggest thing was a lot of misunderstanding about the laws, like regarding going outside and even just going beyond the Italian borders,” he said.

4:05 What it’s like returning home after being stranded in Italy

Growing increasingly concerned, he knew it was time to come home, but booking a flight back to Canada was no easy task.

“It was actually very tough,” he said. “Two or three times I tried booking a flight home, they all got cancelled.

“So I ended up flying to Germany and then London. From there, I managed to get a flight home.”

2:32 Coronavirus outbreak: B.C. health officer says no reliable at-home testing yet

So far, Coombs appears healthy with no symptoms.

While the number of COVID-19 cases continues to climb in B.C. and elsewhere across the nation, Coombs is hoping Canadians don’t make the same mistake as Italy did.

“This world needs to make a big change,” he said. “Stay inside and take those extra precautions . . . there’s no room for error.”