HALIFAX -- Kelly Marshall is trying to stay positive, hoping her dad will pull through as he battles COVID-19 in hospital.

“He’s in an ICU, he’s still critical,” she says, speaking from her mother’s home in Stellarton, N.S.

“What they’ll do is they’ll lift his sedation to allow his body to start to work … to see how he handles it, and then if he struggles, they’ll put him back on the ventilator.”

Marshall says her father, Rick Cameron, was rushed to the Aberdeen Hospital in New Glasgow, N.S., by ambulance last Thursday, after the 69-year-old began having trouble breathing.

An X-ray revealed he had the disease in both his lungs. He was then transferred Friday to the intensive care unit at the hospital in Truro, N.S., and put in an induced coma.

Marshall says it started with what seemed like a common cold. Her dad began experiencing symptoms more than two weeks after returning from a February trip to Florida.

She says he then became very sick, very quickly. His wife Faye called 911.

“It settled in his chest,” she says. “He ended up getting a fever, really bad chills, sweats … if he took a deep breath it would almost cut him off and cause this cough and he couldn’t catch his breath.”

Marshall says he has improved slightly this week, coming out of sedation and breathing on his own for brief periods and moving his head around a little.

Cameron had been in Florida from Feb. 10 to the 21. He is one of two people currently in hospital because of COVID-19. His family cannot visit him because of a ban on visitors in provincial hospitals put in place by the Nova Scotia Health Authority.

“We’re all trying to be positive. The doctors are being positive,” Marshall says.

"If anybody can fight it, my dad will."

Marshall, her husband, and her mother are now all living together in quarantine.

Cameron’s wife of 51 years also tested positive for the novel coronavirus after she came down with a fever and a cough. Marshall says her mom is now living isolated in one area of the house with her own bathroom.

Marshall and her partner tested negative.

Marshall is now urging citizens to take the advice of public health officials seriously and follow it. She wrote about her father's experience in a Facebook post this week, imploring others to pay attention. 

 “Please, please listen to everything that they’re saying,” she says. “It’s here … it’s real and it’s scary.”