We’re day seven or eight and will have a couple more days of symptoms and will have to self-isolate.” I spoke to Strickland-Grogan on 19 March and she said at the time: “We’re just at the end but it comes and goes. What helped her to get through the worst of it was having a routine at home, where Strickland-Grogan and her husband created a shift of two hours on, two hours off. “We haven’t kept away from them, so I assume they have had it,” she says. Strickland-Grogan says that her children, who are two and seven, must have had the virus, although they haven’t displayed symptoms. It was nothing to be scared of but walking up and down the stairs and talking can make you feel out of breath.” The main symptom was that we both had breathing difficulties. It was somewhat ironically Friday 13th that Strickland-Grogan, who is otherwise healthy, realised she was sick, and she tells me: “On Friday night I started to get chest pains and my husband Pete, who is asthmatic, had a temperature. She tells me: “I lived through in the last week what a lot of people are about to experience,” adding: “The one message I want to send out is, it’s possible, be brave.”

She is getting over the virus she continued to work on the go-live and she managed to look after her children. The reason Strickland-Grogan is talking to me is not to add to the growing fear surrounding the virus, in fact, quite the opposite.

It fairly quickly became clear that this wasn’t just exhaustion: both Strickland-Grogan and her husband had contracted COVID-19. I thought I must be really tired from the project.”

Strickland-Grogan, who is based in the UK and working in the UK during go-live, said: “From Wednesday night I became really fatigued and instead of supporting the go-live I went to sleep.

Monday 9th March was a big day for slicedbread project manager, Jennie Strickland-Grogan: it was the first stage of go-live of the company’s sharedo case management system at Australian law firm Hall & Wilcox, so after months of hard work it was no wonder she was feeling exhausted.

We must be brave