A Virginia mother has blamed “selfish” people for sending their unwell kids to school after her 10-year-old daughter died of Covid-19 just days after she began feeling sick.
Nicole and Jeff Sperry said their daughter Teresa was “perfectly healthy” till she developed the first symptoms of the coronavirus infection on 22 September.
The student of Hillpoint Elementary School in Suffolk, Virginia was given the job of a nurse in her class and was required to walk sick students to the nurses’ office, Ms Sperry said in a Facebook post.
“We are home. But we left a huge piece of our hearts at CHKD [Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters]. It hurts so much to not have her here,” Ms Sperry said. “And I want to explain by complications that her heart just gave up. Our daughter was perfectly healthy. And would have continued to be here if people would have stopped sending their sick kids to school.”
Teresa’s first Covid symptom was a headache when she returned home from school on Wednesday, 22 September. She got a fever the next day. They consulted the family paediatrician, who scheduled them for a Covid test the following Monday (27 September) and asked the family to keep the child under quarantine.
But on Sunday (26 September), Teresa started coughing and threw up before the family rushed her to a local emergency room.
“They did her chest X-ray and when they came back, they said that there was no signs of Covid pneumonia, her lungs were perfect, beautiful. They didn’t seem concerned,” Ms Sperry told CNN.
Teresa came back home and remained in quarantine. But her condition deteriorated in the next 24 hours. She stopped breathing and was taken to a local hospital and then transferred to Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, where she was announced dead.
“We did everything we could have done and now we’ve lost a part of our hearts. Covid is real and it doesn’t care who it takes. If you are still under the delusion that it’s not, then you can gladly unfriend me and I can guarantee you that I won’t miss you,” Ms Sperry said in a Facebook post.
Ms Sperry said that the evening her daughter died and when she was sitting next to her daughter’s dead body, some parents in a nearby school district, where Ms Sperry teaches, were advocating for schools to drop mask mandates as “Covid is effectively over.”
“Wear a damn mask! Get vaccinated! Social distance! And most importantly stop complaining and keep your sick kids at home. Because in the end you will still get to hug yours,” she added.
Teresa’s parents and her two older brothers were fully vaccinated. But Teresa and her younger brother were too young to be vaccinated. After Teresa’s illness, Mr Sperry developed a breakthrough Covid infection, while Ms Sperry tested negative.
Despite contracting Covid, Mr Sperry said he wanted to speak to the media to get the story of his daughter out and “to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families.”
Mr Sperry added that one of the things Teresa told them before she got sick was that “her job was to be the ‘class nurse’ to take the sick kids” from the class to the nurse’s office. “And you have to understand my daughter, this is who she is, helping people is my daughter, it’s not something that she wouldn’t have wanted to do,” he said.
But Dr John B Gordon, III, Suffolk Public Schools Division superintendent, said that at Hillpoint Elementary School, a teacher or an adult was supposed to take an unwell child to the nurse’s office. “We are still investigating to ensure that this process was followed with fidelity,” he said.
