‘Joyful’ Mom Gives Birth After Contracting Coronavirus But Dies Before She Can Hold Her Baby

A Maryland mom who gave birth to her son while fighting coronavirus died this week before ever having the chance to meet her newborn.

Wogene Debele, 43, died on Tuesday, more than three weeks after her son Levi was born one month premature and rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), the Washington Post reported.

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Debele also left behind her husband, Yilma Asfaw Tadesse, 50, and three other children, Mihret, 17, Naod, 10, and Asher, 4, according to the Post.

“Wogene was kind, joyful, and a source of strength to her family and to all who knew her,” reads a GoFundMe page arranged to help support her surviving family.

Debele began exhibiting symptoms like a loss of appetite and a cough in mid-March, and first sought treatment at the hospital on March 19, the Post reported.

She was turned away and told she did not seem sick enough to be tested for COVID-19, but as the week went on, her condition worsened, and by March 25, she was back in the hospital, her family told the Post. Doctors induced labor that night after she tested positive.

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Before leaving for the hospital a second time, Debele told her children, “I’m just going to get a checkup. I’ll be right back.” It was the last time she’d be able to speak to her kids, Mihret told the Post.

Debele was transported to a different hospital two days later, and though she seemed to be getting better, her condition deteriorated once again before her death on Tuesday, according to the Post.

Little Levi, meanwhile, was able to go home on April 19 after spending 21 days in the NICU as his family quarantined at home.

It’s unclear if Debele suffered from any pre-existing medical conditions prior to contracting the virus. People ages 65 and older are at a higher risk of severe illness from coronavirus, as are people with underlying medical conditions, including heart conditions, obesity, diabetes, liver disease and chronic kidney disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All but 6 percent of patients who needed hospitalization had one pre-existing condition, and the majority — 88 percent — had two or more, according to a large study of thousands of patients in New York City that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“My heart is broken. I don’t know what to do without her,” Debele’s husband told the Post.

Debele and Tadesse reportedly met in their native Ethiopia, and immigrated from Addis Ababa to Takoma Park, Maryland about 10 years ago.

In the U.S., Debele, a stay-at-home mom, was an active member of the local Ethiopian community, including the International Evangelical Ethiopian Church in Washington, D.C.

“She was very pure of heart,” Tadesse told the Post.

Her daughter Mihret, meanwhile, remembered her mom as someone who was “kind to everyone she met” and would always step up to help others.

“Even when she was super tired, she always put other people first,” Mihret told the newspaper.

The GoFundMe for the family has so far raised more than $193,000.

As of Friday afternoon, there have been 16,616 cases and 723 deaths attributed to coronavirus in Maryland, according to The New York Times. There have been 868,954 cases and 44,572 deaths in the United States.