A California husband and wife died from COVID-19 just weeks apart, leaving behind five young children, including their newborn daughter.
Family members told CBS News that Daniel and Davy Macias contracted the virus after visiting the beach and going to an indoor water park at the end of July. The couple were transported to the ICU last month, and Davy was seven months pregnant at the time, with her baby being born days before she succumbed to COVID. She didn’t get a chance to meet her daughter; Daniel was shown a photo of his newborn girl before also dying from the virus.
“I don’t know anyone who loved their kids as much as they did, and they made sure they told them every day,” Terri Serey, Daniel’s sister-in-law, told KTLA-TV. “I want them to be aware of how much they’re loved. And I want them to know how much their parents loved them.”
Because Davy was pregnant, she was uncertain about getting vaccinated. She worked as a nurse in the labor and delivery ward in a local medical facility and had continued to work there during the pandemic. It also seems that Daniel was unvaccinated.
“It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be vaccinated—they planned on it,” Terry Macias, the grandmother. told CNN.
Daniel was a middle school math teacher, who is “remembered as a compassionate, kind-hearted, fun-loving and generous teacher at Jehue Middle School but he was also a devoted family man,” the Rialto Unified School District said in a statement.
The couple’s children are all ages eight and under, and are now in the care of their grandparents. The newborn daughter is still unnamed.
A GoFundMe page has been created for the family, which, as of this writing, has exceeded its $200,000 goal by $40,000.
