Ofelia Rousseva thought she just had the flu before she died of COVID-19 on March 19, becoming the second person in Allegheny County to die of the disease.

Even though the flu conditions were enough that Rousseva, 78, slept for most of two days before she died in her son’s home in Greenfield — she had been visiting from her home in Bulgaria since November — she told her son she did not want to go to the hospital.

“She didn’t have insurance. She thought she might not be able to pay the bills,” her son, Ludmil Velev, said Wednesday from his hospital bed at UPMC Presbyterian, where he has been treated for COVID-19 since Monday. “And being a foreigner, she was worried even more.”

Velev said he told his mother — a famed women’s choir director in her hometown in Sofia, Bulgaria — that she should go to the hospital.

“She was refusing to go,” said Velev, 43, a Lyft and Uber driver who has difficulty breathing now. “She thought it was regular flu and that it would get better by itself.”

That was partly because Velev’s daughter, Isabella, 4, got sick first about two weeks ago “but she went through it fast” and was fine in a couple days. Then his wife, Carmen Blanco, got sick just briefly and was fine in a day.

Both he and his mother started getting sick at about the same time, around March 12. That was about the time that Velev said he stopped taking rides.

By March 16, his mother “was really bad.” He thinks now that his mother “misled” him — that she was worse off than she was telling him, when she said she just needed to rest and she’d be better.

Velev said he never suspected his mother or anyone in the family had COVID-19 because “my daughter got better so fast.”

The mild impact of COVID-19 on many children has been one of the distinctive traits of the disease that researchers continue to try to understand. But the disease also has been notoriously severe on people over 60.

By March 19, Rousseva woke up feeling worse and asked for help getting downstairs. Velev said his wife helped her downstairs and his mother became unresponsive. He said he called 911, but his mother’s heart had stopped by the time an ambulance arrived.

Velev said he started doing CPR on her until the medics arrived dressed in hazmat suits. “They did everything they could for 40 minutes,” he said. “But she was gone.”

Velev said he did not know that his mother had COVID-19 until she was tested after she died. He was told this past weekend. The official cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome due to COVID-19 virus infection.

A family friend in Pittsburgh set up a Go Fund Me online page to raise money to help the family.

By Sean D. Hamill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

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