The identity of a Kansas grandmother who is now the first death recorded by COVID-19 in the United States was revealed, after changing her cause of death to make her the virus in May.
For more than a year, the first death of COVID-19 in the country was believed to have been Patricia Dowd, a California woman who died of the virus on February 6, 2020.
But a Bay Area News Group investigation revealed that five January 2020 deaths had recently been listed as COVID-19-related; the first was Lovell Brown, of Leavenworth, Kansas, who died at the age of 78 on January 9, 2020, according to the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment.
His identity was not made public due to patient privacy laws and Brown’s relatives were not notified of the change to his death certificate.
Brown’s daughter, Peaches Foster, requested a copy of her mother’s modified death certificate after The Mercury News contacted her through the Funeral Home that ran Brown’s funeral services.
An intensive care physician changed the cause of Brown’s death just three months ago, on May 12, from “acute stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” to “COVID-19 Pneumonia,” Mercury News reports.
It is unknown why they did so a year after Brown’s death.
The identity of the first death of COVID-19 was revealed to be Lovell Brown, of Kansas. He died at Providence Hospital after experiencing COVID-19-related symptoms at Christmas 2019
Brown died at the age of 78 on January 9, 2020, but his cause of death had initially been categorized as “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease of acute stroke.” It is not known why he switched to “COVID-19 pneumonia” three months ago, a year after Brown’s death
Foster tried to contact the doctor, but was told he was busy treating patients with COVID-19.
He reportedly told his brother that he believed his mother could have died from COVID-19 in March 2020, as the country was entering a closure and cases were on the rise in all states.
Before he died, Brown experienced COVID-like symptoms, including headaches, coughing, fever, and body aches.
The symptoms had started at Christmas 2019, when relatives complained that he could not taste the food they had brought him to the nursing home where he resided.
Brown had pre-existing conditions that could have increased the severity of his symptoms.
He suffered from diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had suffered from lung cancer years ago.
The Centers for Disease Control has reported 5,450 deaths from COVID-19 in the state of Kansas since the pandemic began
The United States has recorded more than 640,000 deaths since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic
The CDC has reported that there are currently more than 39 million cases of COVID-19 in the US
Cases and deaths of Covid-19 have increased over the summer as the infectious variant of Delta became the most common in the US
She was initially taken to Saint John’s Hospital after beginning to have trouble breathing and then taken to the intensive care unit at Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, where she died.
Ten months after Brown’s death, his sister and brother-in-law also died of COVID.
Although it is suspected that the disease already existed in the United States in December 2019, without a tissue or blood sample from Brown, which was incinerated, it is impossible to confirm the cause of his death.
Sam Allred, a spokesman for Providence Hospital, told The Mercury News that they would help Foster navigate the change in his mother’s death certificate and that the reason comes a year later.
“We will work with her to try to get answers that we can,” he said.
The five modified COVID-19 deaths, January 2020, in California, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Wisconsin and Kansas have altered the national perception of the events that unfolded in the early stages of the pandemic, when the virus was new and many patients were misdiagnosed. , or stayed home and attributed the symptoms to a cold.
California has recorded 5,450 deaths from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
There are currently 373,171 cases of COVID-19 and 12,810 hospitalizations in the state, according to the Kansas Department of Health and the Environment.