One year later: Sask. woman reflects on COVID pandemic experience

One year ago, Tiffany Martinka and her husband were on a hot holiday in Punta Cana when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The couple left Saskatoon on a direct flight for their winter vacation on March 11.

“Leading up to the flight COVID was starting to escalate but there was not a single case yet in Saskatchewan. So we were kind of getting a little bit leery, but we really had no reason to cancel our flight and our trip,” Martinka explained on The Brent Loucks Show.

She said because their flight was direct from Saskatoon, they felt even safer about the risks.

One day later, on March 12, everything changed. The first presumptive positive case was confirmed in Saskatchewan.

“Everything hits the fan. Everything starts to shut down; the NHL, the NBA. We were getting messages from back home that the school was shutting down,” she said. “It was so hard to relax being that far from home. We’re in this beautiful resort and the last thing we could do was relax.”

Martinka and her husband started looking into flights to get home as soon as they could.

The following Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced all flights from the Caribbean would continue as scheduled. The Martinkas breathed a sigh of relief.

“But even then, things were changing so fast that we were apprehensive that we would actually get home and that is such a scary thought,” Martinka recalled.

They arrived back in Saskatoon on March 18, the same day their resort shut down.

Martinka and her husband were required to quarantine for 14 days. Their children didn’t come on the trip with their mom and dad, so that meant the family wasn’t able to quarantine together.

“To be told that we had to then quarantine without (the kids) on top of not seeing them for a week was really hard—it almost chokes me up thinking about it,” she said. “But we did it for them because that was what was in their best interest to keep them safe.”

Tiffany and her husband ended up testing positive for COVID-19 during that time with only minor symptoms.

She plans on getting vaccinated when it’s her turn.

“I wish we knew more about people who’ve had COVID, if they have the antibodies or not, but we don’t have the info, so I am going to go ahead and get the vaccine —100 per cent,” she said.

For the foreseeable future the couple plans to stay pretty close to home as well.

“I don’t think I want to leave the country for a long time,” Martinka said.