Vic Carder, a former Florida pro, went back to work Saturday in China, the epicenter of the coronavirus that was labeled a global pandemic.
Vic Carder went back to work on Saturday in China, the epicenter of the coronavirus that was labeled a global pandemic Wednesday.
The former Southwest Florida golf club professional has lived in China the past 9 1/2 years, so he had early knowledge of dealing with the coronavirus outbreak that started there around the new year.
“Let people know we will all get through this. Please take this serious,” Carder, the club professional at Foshan Golf Club in the Guandong Province, wrote in an email Saturday.
Carder, 64, returned from a Jan. 31 planned trip to Thailand on Feb. 28 and was in self-quarantine for 14 days after that, following the country’s procedure.
Carder said he does not know anyone who has contracted the virus, and that in Foshan, the city of 6 million he lives in, there have been 84 cases to his knowledge, with no deaths.
Since early January, the coronavirus has quickly spread, with more than 150,000 cases worldwide, and over 5,000 deaths.
As of the Centers for Disease Control’s most recent update at the end of the day Friday, there were 1,629 cases in the United States, with 41 deaths. On Saturday, Florida updated its total cases by 25, to 70 total, and reported a third death, an Orange County resident who died after being diagnosed while traveling in California.
As for Carder, he was happy to get back to work Saturday and said there were 90 golfers and the driving range was busy. He gives eight or nine 1-hour lessons usually on a Saturday but had four.
“All my lessons are children and some of them are still staying inside,” he said. “All the kids are taking school online.”
Carder can take a cart to his apartment, so he did not leave the golf community property Saturday.
“I’m hoping that by April 1 we start to get back to normal, but the government will go slow to make sure they have this contained,” he said. “They are even starting to open Disneyland in Shanghai, and I read that all Apple stores are closed everywhere, but in Mainland China they are open. So slowly it’s getting closer to normal, but it was a massive shutdown.”
Carder said, compared to its usual pace, Foshan remains fairly quiet. In a mass email to friends on Jan. 29, Carder described it as quiet as after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001.
“It’s still quiet,” Carder said Saturday. “No construction going on and there is always construction going on — think of Naples 2004-2005.”
Carder said his trip to Thailand and experience there was easy. He had one set of paperwork to fill out when he landed in Bangkok.
“They kept their borders open to China while I was there,” Carder said. “Now they have a 14-day quarantine, plus you have to have a medical report saying that you do not have the virus before you’re even allowed to board the plane.”
Carder said in Thailand, he ate street food and went to the night markets without any issues.
“I think Thailand has less than 100 cases now, so pretty safe,” he said. “It seems like Southeast Asia is doing a good job of controlling the virus.”
When Carder returned to the airport in Guangzhou, his temperature was taken three different times, he had paperwork to fill out, and was asked if he had been to Korea.
“The drive home is usually about 1 1/2 hours; it was only 45 minutes,” Carder said. “Once I got to the main gate into my apartment, the guard stopped us and checked the driver and my temperature.”
After getting in his apartment, he was asked to fill out more paperwork and downloaded an app to check where he had been the past 28 days.
“I can’t go out at all, my staff brings me food and I have to have someone walk my dog Casey,” Carder wrote in a mass email on March 7 that included a Daily News reporter.
Carder said the club’s general manager went to London when the outbreak first started and flew back on March 6. Passengers were kept on the plane for three hours because some people who had been in Italy were on the plane, and those passengers were taken off first and separately.
In the mass email on Jan. 29, Carder included a photo of himself with a mask over his nose and mouth and updated his situation.
In 2017, Carder came back to the U.S. with a group of eight of his golf school junior students from China. They visited FGCU’s Professional Golf Management program facility and played with The First Tee of Naples/Collier golfers at Heritage Bay, Grey Oaks, Hideout and Countryside.
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