Not Just The Flu

Christopher Mathias
·8 min read
Rolin and Beverly Baker met 50 years ago and raised a family outside of Youngstown, Ohio. (Photo: Courtesy of Holly Baker)
Rolin and Beverly Baker met 50 years ago and raised a family outside of Youngstown, Ohio. (Photo: Courtesy of Holly Baker)

The last time Beverly Baker saw her husband was the morning of Sunday, March 29, when the paramedics pushed him into an ambulance outside her Canfield, Ohio, home. She couldn’t go with him to the hospital, the paramedics explained, because she’s probably infected too.

So Beverly, 70, stayed home. An agonizing hour or two later the hospital called. Rolin, 69, whom she met at a bar some 50 years ago, with whom she raised two beautiful daughters, the man who was the love of her life, had died of complications from COVID-19, with no family allowed by his side, none given the chance to say goodbye.

Beverly has been alone in her house ever since, part of an intensive two-week quarantine to protect others from the pestilence that took her husband.

Her youngest daughter, Holly, visited soon after Rolin’s death and pressed her hand up against the glass front door. Beverly, still inside, pressed her hand against the glass too.

Holly, a 40-year-old electrical technician, says she has visited a few times now with her two kids. They park the car in the driveway and sit on the tailgate while Beverly stays on the porch. “I just can’t believe your dad’s gone,” Beverly says.

Holly described the torture of these socially distanced visits in a recent phone call with HuffPost. “We can’t hug her,” she said of her mother. “We can’t hold her. We cannot console her.”

“This is just hard not being with each other,” Holly continued, crying. “It’s very, very hard to lose somebody to begin with, but not being able to be with one another is probably the most excruciating pain I’ve ever had to feel in my life.”

COVID-19 is cruel not only for the way it rips the breath out of bodies, or for the way it leaves its victims to die alone, but also because the necessary efforts to slow its spread can force people to grieve in solitude, separated from those they might need the most.

As the virus rampaged through China and Italy and elsewhere before finding its current epicenter in America, it left in its wake horror stories of family members mourning in isolation and scarcely attended funerals.

Now, Americans are getting to know those stories firsthand. The virus, it turns out, despite petulant protestations from the president and Fox News, is so much more than just the flu. It’s a plague.

The deeply personal pain the Bakers feel right now — and the inability to console each other for fear of spreading the virus — will be experienced by so many Americans in the coming weeks and months. The virus has already claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S.; late last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted the virus would kill 100,000 to 240,000 people in this country.

‘When Pawpaw was at home, what did he do?’

(Photo: Courtesy of Holly Baker)
(Photo: Courtesy of Holly Baker)

Rolin Baker died in the same town where he was born: Boardman, Ohio. He graduated from Boardman High School in 1968 and went on to work at Schwebel Baking Co. in nearby Youngstown, where he worked for 30 years as head of maintenance.

“He was very selfless,” Holly said. “He put everybody before himself, especially his wife and children.” He coached Holly’s softball team from the time she was 7 until she turned 18. More recently, Tuesdays were his days to bring Holly’s son, his grandson, to soccer practice.

He was a craftsman too, and built a grandfather clock that sits in the living room that only Beverly occupies now.

Rolin got his news primarily from one channel, Holly told HuffPost. By way of demonstrating this, she put her 9-year-old son on the phone. “When Pawpaw was at home, what did he do?” Holly asked him.

“Fox News,” her son replied.

But in the months leading up to his death, Rolin’s favorite channel — and the president it cheerleads — routinely downplayed the severity of the virus that would eventually kill him.

“My dad always said, ‘Oh, it’s just a virus. It’s gonna run its course,’” Holly recalled.

There was plenty of reason for Rolin — and millions of Americans — to believe this. Fox News pundits repeatedly stated COVID-19 was similar to the seasonal flu, even though the virus is twice as contagious, 10 times more deadly, requires longer hospital stays, and at this point, cannot be stopped with a vaccine.

Two separate polls have found that about 50% of Fox News viewers believed the coronavirus to be less deadly than, or just as deadly as, the flu.

On March 24 — when 16 states had already issued stay-at-home orders, the Tokyo Olympics were postponed for a year, and New Jersey planned to release 1,000 prisoners to protect them from the virus — President Donald Trump appeared on Fox News to downplay COVID-19 as just the flu.

“I mean, think of it,” Trump said on the Fox News town hall. “We average 36,000 people. Death, death. I’m not talking about cases. I’m talking about death. 36,000 deaths a year. People die, 36 — from the flu. But we’ve never closed down the country for the flu.”

‘I just love you guys so much.’

The same day as Trump’s appearance on Fox, Rolin ran a temperature of 102 degrees. He’d been sick for days but had tested negative for influenza A and B at a local flu clinic. He went to the emergency room. There, Holly says, doctors conducted a CT scan, revealing that he had “ground glass opacities” in his lungs consistent with the coronavirus.

The doctors told him he had COVID-19 but didn’t give him an official swab test. Instead, they released him to go home and said to come back if his symptoms grew worse or if his breathing became labored.

Over the next few days, Rolin couldn’t taste or smell. He had chills and body aches. On March 28, Holly and her kids FaceTimed him. Holly’s 19-month-old baby kissed Rolin through the phone.

Holly remembers her father being in so much pain he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. “He just laid there and talked to us ... and he said, ‘I just love you guys so much,’” she recalled.

“And looking back, I think he kind of knew.”

The next morning, on March 29, Rolin had trouble breathing. The ambulance picked him up at his home and brought him to St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital, where he was taken to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator. A short time later, Rolin, who had stents in his heart from a 2006 heart attack, went into cardiac arrest.

He died at 11:29 a.m., according to a copy of his death certificate obtained by HuffPost.

The doctor listed his cause of death as pneumonia — which is how fatalities caused by the virus have often been recorded. Public health experts have warned this could lead to undercounting of those killed by COVID-19.

Holly says they’ll bury her father the Tuesday after Easter — the holiday Trump originally predicted would be when the country would come out of its current shutdown.

There will only be 10 people allowed at the funeral, per government guidelines. Beverley will be there, finally allowed outside of her house. Holly says she hopes to hug her mom.

Someday down the line, when this is all over, they’ll throw a big ol’ celebration of her dad. “I don’t care who shows up,” Holly said. “Anybody that knew him, anybody that even knew his name from anywhere is more than welcome to show up and tell me stories about him.”

Meanwhile, Mahoning County, where Holly and Beverly live, has emerged as an epicenter of the pandemic in Ohio. There have been 305 confirmed cases of the virus in the county as of Wednesday, according to the county health department, including 28 deaths.

“I just feel like I’m in a movie,” Holly told HuffPost. “I feel like I’m in ‘Outbreak.’ It does not feel real, because I just don’t feel like I can even walk outside of my own home without feeling like I’m going to get attacked by a virus.”

“How many more of my family members am I going to lose?” she said. “I don’t know.”

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.