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'Love of my life': US woman retrains at 73 to reunite with husband

The pandemic has separated millions of families for months. Now, one Californian woman is going to extreme lengths to see her husband in a nursing facility.

At 73 years old, Linda Bland did not expect to be going back to school.

"It's a lot of things to learn but I think I can do it," she said.

She is studying to become a certified nursing assistant (CNA), just to be near her favorite patient.

"I love him so much, he is the love of my life," she said.

Linda went from visiting her husband Jim daily at his Sonora nursing facility, to being forced to say hi to him from outside his window when the pandemic hit.

"He couldn't even see me. He doesn't know how to talk on the telephone," she said.

"Very sad, very sad to see him like that."

While visiting in-person, nurses put Jim in a sealed booth for safety, but it only caused more confusion for her husband of 26 years, a retired Tuolumne County Sheriff's lieutenant who has Parkinson's and dementia.

"I needed to do something because with this pandemic, you don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. You don't know when it's going to be over and I don't want my husband to die without knowing that I am here," she said.

Linda is now spending hours in class and studying to spend just minutes with her husband.

On Thursday during her orientation, she spent her 15-minute break holding Jim's hand for the first time in a year.

"He looks at me as said 'Oh, you look like her' and I say 'Who is her?' and I said, 'Your wife?' And I said, 'I am your wife, Linda'. And I start crying," she said.

While Jim may not remember the year they've lost, he has not forgotten Linda.

"I say I love you a lot and he said I love you too. He was so happy, you could tell," she said.

A lesson in love and determination, this student could teach a course on.

"He is my husband and I think he would do the same for me," she said

The CNA course is two months long. From there Linda will have to take a state test to become certified. Even if she doesn't pass, she said it's still worth it to be able to see her husband.

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Victoria records no new local COVID-19 cases for second day

Victoria has recorded a second day without any new community-acquired cases of COVID-19.

There were also no new cases detected in the state's hotel quarantine system.

The promising figures come from 10,339 coronavirus tests conducted in the previous 24 hours.

READ MORE: Pfizer vaccines land in Australian capital cities on eve of first jabs

https://twitter.com/VicGovDH/status/1363237013755998210?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It comes after Health Minister Martin Foley said that Victoria's Hotel Inn cluster is "increasingly under control".

"Another day of no locally acquired cases does give our team increasing confidence that the Holiday Inn cluster is increasingly under control but it's far from being over and vigilance needs to be maintained," Mr Foley said yesterday.

"We are still approaching that outbreak with the upmost vigilance and caution."

Three new locally acquired cases were reported on Friday – two parents and a child from the one family, all of whom are primary close contacts of the Holiday Inn hotel outbreak.

As a result of the positive case, Victorian health authorities issued an alert for a low level tier-three risk exposure site: Coles Express at 21 Ardena Court in East Bentleigh.

Anyone who visited the location between 1pm to 1.40pm on February 18 should monitor symptoms and get tested if they develop symptoms.

Victoria will begin vaccinating people who are most at-risk of contracting COVID-19 tomorrow.

The first Victorians to get the Pfizer jab for coronavirus will be frontline workers under phase 1A, including hotel quarantine workers staff and port of entry workers who are on the forefront of the state's quarantine system.