When Viorel Cataramă, a businessman and former Romanian senator, decided to try to contract COVID-19 deliberately by traveling to a virus hotspot and initiating physical contact with members of the public, even his wife decided that his behaviour was unacceptably dangerous. 

Adina Alberts, who works as a doctor told CGTN she temporarily separated from her husband, taking their daughter with her.

"We chose different paths for a while. I knew it would be hard, but I couldn't deny my duty as medic and mother. I moved out of the house for a while with our daughter, so that we wouldn't get exposed to this virus," she said in a telephone interview. 

Viorel Cataramă has been a virulent critic of lockdown measures in Romania, where the rules have been enforced with more fines than elsewhere in Europe. Official figures show that more than 1,300 people have died after contracting the virus in the country, part of a global toll closing in on 400,000.

After failing to get himself voluntarily admitted to the three specialized coronavirus treatment centers in Bucharest, he headed to a quarantined commune in the southeast of the country that had been identified as a high-risk area. Once there he began hugging random people, prompting police to place him under criminal investigation for deliberately undermining efforts to contain the disease.

"I am totally against such an approach. We do not know yet what we are up against, we do not know the enemy and we don't have an effective cure to this disease. The risk is too great," his wife said. 

"As a doctor I saw coronavirus as a threat to people who I swore to help and protect. I believe that we must not be subjected to such an experiment". 

Cataramă's actions drew widespread condemnation from the medical community.

"He has no understanding of what a virus is or how dangerous this disease truly is. I can only liken this so-called experiment to attempted murder", Marian George, who helps treat coronavirus patients in a hospital in Bucharest, told CGTN Europe. 

However, Cataramă's attempts to contract COVID-19 failed. And after two weeks and a series of negative tests, Alberts moved back in with her husband.