STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Newswatch 16 spoke to one Penn State student who is returning home from a semester in Florence this week.
"It's crazy. It happened in the blink of an eye."
For the last two months, Penn State junior Maddy Knight has been experiencing the trip of a lifetime studying abroad in Florence, Italy.
Between the visits to the Duomo, the gondola rides in Venice, the chocolate making in Switzerland, she wasn't spending a lot of time thinking about the coronavirus spreading around the world.
"On Monday last week, it was a conversation, but nobody really knew to what extent it was going to be," Knight said. "We had a positive outlook, and we were in denial that we were going to go home. And then it blew up last week, and we left for spring break, thinking we were going to go back to Florence."
But that didn't happen.
Instead, Maddy and everyone else in her program were told they had to be out of Europe by March 6 or face a student conduct violation.
Right now, Maddy is staying with another Penn State student who is studying in Barcelona. She'll fly home from there on Friday, her belongings flying behind her, gathered and packed up by an official in the program.
Just a few days ago, the CDC upgraded Italy's travel restrictions to Level 3, meaning you should avoid all non-essential travel there. The country now has the highest number of deaths outside of China, hitting 79 on Tuesday.
Penn State is reimbursing students for their return flight home since most had already booked theirs for the beginning of May.
But the money spent on trips to Dublin, Amsterdam, and Greece that Maddy had planned for the rest of the semester is a different story.
"I'm just thankful for the experience I got, traveling with my best friends. I would have never expected that this would happen, but I'm still very thankful that I got to do some of it."
The students will complete their courses online.
Maddy is in contact with the school to see if she can move back to campus. If she returns to campus, she will be required to do a 14-day self-quarantine.
