At eight months pregnant, 33-year-old Erika Becerra tested positive for COVID-19 and gave birth to a baby boy on Nov. 15.
After the successful birth of a healthy baby boy in Detroit, Michigan, Becerra was then put on a ventilator for breathing problems, CNN reported. Becerra ended up dying three weeks later on Dec. 3, never having gotten the opportunity to hold her newborn son.
“Erica was the most wonderful person you could ever meet.”
Erika Becerra gave birth to a healthy baby but died of Covid-19 before she could hold him. https://t.co/pbFsmyGGKL pic.twitter.com/Srr8I5hjgU
— CNN (@CNN) December 8, 2020
“Erica was the most wonderful person you could ever meet,” her brother, Michael Avilez explained. “For here, other people’s happiness was her happiness.”
Avilez explained that his sister wasn’t afraid of being pregnant during a pandemic, she would wear a mask and wipe down surfaces whenever she went out.
“She followed every rule in the book and she still ended up catching it and it’s sad,” Avilez explained. “You got a lot of people who don’t understand what’s going on… they all think it’s a joke until it happens to them or one of their family members.”
“Right after she gave birth to her son, they put her on a tube because her body wasn’t retaining oxygen anymore and after that she wasn’t able to meet her newborn baby,” Avilez explained. (RELATED: Police Raid Home Of Woman Who Built COVID-19 Tracking Software For Government)
Becerra didn’t have any underlying conditions. She was one of the 15,658 coronavirus deaths to happen over the last seven days, the deadliest week for COVID-19 since April in the United States, CNN reported.