Who was Emily Victoria Viegas? Girl, 13, dies after weeklong battle with Covid-19, GoFundMe raises $38,000
A 13-year-old girl from Brampton, Canada, died on Thursday, April 22, after contracting Covid-19, making her among the youngest people to die from the virus in the country. Residents in the community are mourning the loss of one of Emily Victoria Viegas. It was recently reported that the teenager started showing some of the Covid-19 symptoms that had put her mother in the hospital such as difficulty breathing.
Her father Carlos was faced with an agonizing situation. He was the only person in his family of four who tested negative for Covid-19 and was at home in Brampton, Ontario, with his two children while his wife was at Brampton Civic Hospital on oxygen. Carlos was under strict self-isolation orders from public health authorities and wasn’t sure if he should call an ambulance. He also knew Brampton Civic was one of the most strained hospitals in the country and he feared his daughter might be taken to a hospital further away in another Toronto suburb, Oakville. Carlos got vaccinated on April 12, 2021, but his wife, still recovering in hospital, hasn’t received her jab yet.
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On April 21, just one day before Emily's death, Carlos checked her temperature, gave her Tylenol to bring down her fever and told her to drink lots of water and to eat some of her favorite food such as hot dogs and multi-grain pasta, even though she didn’t have much of an appetite. On April 22, Emily became one of the youngest Canadians to die from Covid-19 and part of a growing trend of younger victims in the pandemic’s third wave.
Carlos, the sole breadwinner of the family, worked at a warehouse and was somehow the only one spared from Covid-19. His wife was the first one to fall ill. She stayed at home for a week before getting tested after she showed Covid-19 symptoms. During that period, Carlos continued going to work and his children occasionally went into their mother’s room to get her food and water. On April 14, the day after Emily's mother got her test results, she had trouble breathing and was taken to hospital and put on oxygen.
Soon, Emily also developed a stubborn cough, but otherwise felt well. But after a week, as she had fever, Emily’s breathing became labored and she started struggling to inhale. “It scared me, but I kept telling her, ‘Slow down. Slow your breathing down so you’re not using all the energy you have to get air,’” he recalled.
On April 22, Emily woke up in her bedroom that she shares with her younger brother, went to the bathroom, then returned to bed. Just after 9 am, Emily’s brother noticed she wasn’t moving and ran to get their father. Carlos found his daughter lying still, her eyes partly open, and completely unresponsive. He dialed 911 and was told to give Emily CPR. When paramedics came, they cleared Carlos and his son out of the room and tried to revive Emily. They even got her heart beating again, but she wasn’t breathing. She was then taken to the hospital and soon Carlos got a call from the doctor saying that she is no more. Doctors said she had Covid-19 as well as pneumonia. “To tell you the truth, it felt real when I found her in bed. I put my head to her chest and I could feel nothing. No heartbeat. No nothing. No breathing,” Carlos said. A GoFundMe fundraiser was set up for Emily, with a target to raise $10,000. The page raised $38,454 for her funeral and burial costs at the time of writing this article.
The mourning family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a Covid-19 hot spot in east Brampton. The city has a 22 per cent test positivity rate for Covid-19, the highest in Ontario.