A vaccinated Michigan couple died less than a minute apart Monday from a breakthrough case of COVID-19. The two were holding hands when they died.
Cal Dunham, 59, and Linda Dunham, 66, started to feel sick during a family camping trip earlier this month but assumed it was a cold. Their daughter, Sarah Dunham, said her father warned her that the couple was not feeling well. The couple was hospitalized and placed on ventilators a few days later, according to a local Fox station.
Doctors told Dunham on Sunday there was not much else they could do, and the couple would likely need to come off life-support the following day. When it came time to disconnect the couple on Monday, Cal was wheeled into Linda’s room, and the couple was reunited. Fox-17 reported that moments later, the couple held hands, and Cal died at 11:07 a.m. with Linda right behind him at 11:08 a.m.
“[My father] called me before our family camping trip and said he wasn’t feeling good, but he thinks it’s just like sinus, and [Linda] caught it, and she’s like, ‘He gave me his cold,’” Dunham told the local outlet. “The third day, they woke me up and said, ‘We’ve got to go because we don’t feel well.’ So I packed them all up, and they left.”
She always joked and said, ‘Well, you’re going to go before I am. I’ll be right there behind you. I promise,'” Dunham said of her mother. “She really was, like she really was right there behind him.”
According to Dunham, the couple took the virus seriously and were always cautious. However, both had underlying health issues. Dunham said it was comforting to know that her parents were together in both life and death. But her comfort turned to anger at the people who were not taking the virus seriously.
“I’m angry because so many people are like, ‘If I catch COVID, I catch COVID. That’s what it is.’ No, it’s not,” Dunham said. “It could be any person. It could be anybody. They did everything right. They did everything to protocol the way it should be done.”
According to the New York Times, 22,227 people in Michigan have died from COVID-19, and 690,558 people have died in the United States.
