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Man Kept Apart From Wife By Quarantine Honours 67th Anniversary By Her Window

“I wouldn’t want anybody else," Bob Shellard said of his wife, Nancy, who currently resides in a nursing home.

A man adjusting to life during the coronavirus pandemic found a heartwarming way to celebrate his wedding anniversary.

For the first time in their marriage, Connecticut man Bob and his wife Nancy Shellard of Vernon were forced to spend their March 14 anniversary apart. Under normal circumstances, Bob visits Nancy at her nursing home daily. But such visitations are restricted now across the state through at least April because of the escalating COVID-19 outbreak.

On Saturday, however, Bob turned up outside his wife’s facility with balloons and a placard that read, “I’ve loved you 67 years and still do. Happy Anniversary.”

Nancy responded to her husband’s gesture by waving and blowing kisses from her second-story window.

“It makes me feel bad because I want her down with me, and I know she can’t be,” Bob told New England Cable News, an NBC affiliate. “I wouldn’t want anybody else. I don’t think she could put up with anybody else besides me.”

Daughter Laura echoed those sentiments, telling the network that she and her three siblings see their parents as “an inspiration.”

“I can only hope that I have half as much as what they have shared over the years,” she said.

At least 378 people in Australia have tested positive while five people have died after contracting COVID-19, one in WA, three in NSW and one in Queensland.

The virus has killed more than 4,000 people worldwide and continues to spread at a rapid pace.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont on Monday stepped up his state’s response to the coronavirus, joining New York and New Jersey in closing restaurants and movie theaters and limiting public gatherings to fewer than 50 people.

Limits on nonessential nursing home visits were put in place last week. Many of the more than 6,500 people who have died of the coronavirus worldwide have been older than 60 and had underlying medical conditions.

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