BOSTON — A month after a father in western Massachusetts died, his family is still waiting to lay him to rest. Fifty-six-year-old James Footit had the rare and deadly combination of Influenza A and COVID-19.
His daughter, Olivia Footit, told Boston 25 News his health began to rapidly decline.
“It just does not feel real at all, we didn’t get to say goodbye to him. We had driven to the hospital that night and we weren’t allowed to go in because he was in the COVID unit,” she explained.
Her family is still trying to understand what happened.
“It’s a month today that he passed away and it kind of just went like that, but I think the most difficult part is that we can’t have a service anytime soon,” she said.
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Her dad worked at a walk-in clinic in Springfield as an x-ray technologist.
“My father was a healthcare worker and that’s what hits us the most is that he was doing his part, he was going out there knowing, ‘I’m putting my life at risk,’ and it just turned out the worst,” Footit said.
He started feeling sick in March and was first diagnosed with Influenza A. He wasn’t feeling well for a couple of weeks and finally tested positive for COVID-19 on April 4. He died two days later.
“We just thought that he had the flu and once we knew he had COVID, we were like, ‘there’s not much to worry about,’" Footit said. "He had no underlying health conditions whatsoever that we knew of, and that’s why it’s just so confusing. We kind of understand now because he had both the flu and COVID and both were attacking his respiratory system at the same time.”
Dr. C. Michael Gibson, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that early on if you tested positive for a virus, that’s where the testing stopped.
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“No one went on to test for coronavirus," he explained. "Now we know that 7.5% of the time, had you tested for coronavirus, you would have detected it.”
He explained that data from Stanford University shows that it’s still rare to get both the flu and coronavirus at the same time, less than 1%. But it will be important to keep it that way.
“One critical issue will be, in the flu season, we are going to have people who have coronavirus, we are going to have people who have influenza A in the hospital," he explained. "I think we are going to have to have separate areas of the hospital for these patients because we don’t want people to have both types of virus.”
Footit is now worried about what will happen when restrictions are lifted.
“Be smart, just don’t be hanging out with your friends thinking, ‘I’m young,’ or, ‘I don’t have any underlying health conditions,’ because it’s absolutely not the case," she said. "Fifty six years old with no underlying health conditions, it’s just traumatic. It still doesn’t make sense. For you - and not just you and your family, but for everyone else - you just have to do what you can to just stop this completely.”
Footit said her dad did get the flu shot before he got sick. Dr. Gibson said that although the vaccine is obviously not 100% effective, he strongly emphasized it is still your best defense, especially since a vaccine against COVID-19 will likely not be available before flu season starts.
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