A 43-year-old woman has died of coronavirus after giving birth without meeting her newborn.
Wogene Debele, a mother-of-four from Maryland, rushed to a hospital on March 19 after she started showing coronavirus symptoms.
However, the hospital turned her away and refused to test her because she seemed fine.
After her health deteriorated, she rushed to the hospital again on March 25 and tested positive for the deadly virus.
She told her kids before leaving for the hospital: “I’m just going to get a checkup. I’ll be right back.”
Two days later, she was transferred to a different hospital and gave birth to a boy who spent 21 days in the NICU before returning to his home on April 19.
Unfortunately, three weeks after giving birth to her son Levi, Debele passed away without even seeing her son.
She has left behind her 50-year-old husband, Yilma Asfaw Tadesse, and four children – 17-year-old Mihret, 10-year-old Naod, 4-year-old Asher, and newborn Levi.
Her family described her as kind and joyful who was her family’s strength and was pure heart.
Debele’s husband told the Washington Post: “My heart is broken. I don’t know what to do without her. She was very pure of heart.”
“I wasn’t able to share her pain or her joy.”
While her daughter Mihret said: “Even when she was super tired, she always put other people first.”
A GoFundMe page has been created in order to raise funds for Debele’s family which has raised more than $193,000 so far.
Debele was a stay-at-home mother but also an active member of the local Ethiopian community in Washington, D.C.
Debele and her husband Tadesse, who met in their native Ethiopia, immigrated from Addis Ababa to Takoma Park, Maryland almost a decade ago.
Unfortunately, Debele died without even seeing and holding her baby after contracting coronavirus.
[rumble video_id=v2juh3 domain_id=u7nb2]