Virginia Rota, an 18-year-old from the small north Italian city of Bassano del Grappa, arrived in Prineville last summer as a foreign exchange student. She was initially worried about Prineville being a closed-minded small town, but quickly found friends while studying at Crook County High School.

“I met a lot of people that will always be a part of my life,” Rota said. “It’s not about the city or how big it is, it’s about the connections you made with the people, in my opinion.”

But Rota’s year abroad was cut short this week by the fast spreading COVID-19 pandemic. She and 14 other foreign exchange students across Central Oregon are being forced to go home, some to countries, such as Italy and Spain, that have had more COVID-19-related deaths than the U.S., according to the World Health Organization.

For the students and their host families, the early end to their exchange year is heartbreaking.

“When they told me I had to go back … it felt like everything was gone,” Rota, a senior, said Tuesday before she left. “I was really, really sad for leaving my friends so unexpectedly.”

The students are returning to Europe following a decision Friday from EF High School Exchange Year, a Boston-based company that facilitates foreign exchange programs throughout the nation. The company chose to send all its students home.

This was a difficult choice, said Andrea Orrell, who matches exchange students with host families in Central Oregon.

Students were sent home based partly on recommendations from the U.S. Department of State and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and also because the exchange program wanted to reunite international students with their families before the COVID-19 pandemic became worse in the U.S., she said.

“It’s really hard for all these families, because (the exchange students) are part of the family, and they’re being ripped apart right now,” Orrell said. “It’s very scary for them to be returning home to their countries in Europe — they’re nervous about flying on the planes, being in the airport.”

Despite flying back to Italy — which had the world’s highest coronavirus-related death toll as of Tuesday, according to the World Health Organization — early Wednesday morning, Rota admitted she wasn’t nervous about the virus. She believes that because she’s young, she likely won’t die if she contracts COVID-19, she said.

But Rota was frustrated at having to leave Crook County just a few months away from earning a U.S. high school diploma. Now, she’ll have to return to an Italian school after the quarantine period and try to catch up halfway through the school year, she said.

“For all the school stuff, I was more mad,” Rota said. “I’ll have to go back and study lots to try to get into accounting school.”

Rota was also upset about leaving her new friends in Prineville. She thinks she might not ever see them again.

“It’s different from when you leave Italy… because you’re sad, but you’ll still have your friends and family (when you get back),” she said. “When you leave here, the friendships will be just a phone friendship, an online friendship.”

Mikka Jaroni, a 16-year-old German student who attended Mountain View High School in Bend this year, is scheduled to return to Berlin on Friday. He said he wasn’t worried about contracting the virus himself — he thinks Germany “has got it under control” — but he’ll miss his American friends and host family.

Jaroni’s host parent, Russ Rowe, said he and his two kids were distraught about their exchange student leaving early.

“My daughter’s unhappy, she started crying,” Rowe said. “My son shut down, because … Mikka was his brother, and he’s getting ripped from him.”

But there is one EF High School Exchange Year student who will remain in Central Oregon for now.

Martina Zandio Lisarraga, a 15-year-old from Pamplona, Spain, is staying with her host family in Powell Butte until the COVID-19 crisis calms down.

Martina got an exemption from the exchange program after her host family and her family in Spain agreed it was safer for her to stay in the U.S. This is partly due to worries about the relatively young student traveling during COVID-19, but also because her elderly grandmother just moved into her family’s home in Pamplona.

“There were concerns about a 15-year-old traveling through airports in highly infected countries, then settling in with her grandma,” said Jason Ritter, Martina’s host parent. “We said we were very happy to keep her.”

Social distancing in her host family’s Powell Butte home, rather than attending class at Crook County High School, isn’t very fun, Martina said. But she and her host family’s children are making the most of it, playing board games and filming TikTok videos.

“It would be more fun if I could go to school and stuff, but … no one knew this was going to happen,” Martina said. “We just have to stay home, be healthy, and hopefully everything will be fine soon.”