Teresa Sperry, a 10-year-old at Hillpoint Elementary School in Virginia, died from COVID-19 complications after she was tasked with helping her sick classmates.
According to CNN, the school, student Teresa began showing symptoms of COVID-19 on September 2. The young girl’s parents said their baby girl started complaining about a headache and ran a fever within the next few days.
They told the outlet they had scheduled a COVID-19 test for their daughter on September 27, and her symptoms got so bad that they decided to take her to the emergency room the day before instead.
Teresa was tested for both strep throat and coronavirus. Strep came back negative, and the COVID-19 were results were pending.
“They did her chest X-ray, and when they came back, they said that there was no signs of Covid pneumonia; her lungs were perfect, beautiful,” Teresa’s mother Nicole Sperry told the outlet. “They didn’t seem concerned.”
After being confirmed for having COVID-19, Teresa’s parents later took her home, where she remained in quarantine until she stopped breathing, and they transferred her to Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk where she was she died.
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“We are home. But we left a huge piece of our hearts at CHKD,” Nicole wrote in a Sept. 27 Facebook post. “It hurts so much to not have her here. To see her name that I painted on her door a few years ago when we painted her room. To see her cat walking around the house knowing that my diva is never coming back. And I want to explain by complications that her heart just gave up. Our daughter was perfectly healthy.”
Teresa’s dad Jeff said, “One of the things she told us before she got sick, was that her job was to be the ‘class nurse’ to take the sick kids from the class to the nurse’s office.”
He continued, “And you have to understand my daughter, this is who she is, helping people is my daughter, it’s not something that she wouldn’t have wanted to do.”
The school’s protocol is reportedly for the classroom teacher or an adult to contact the main office with a “Code C” if a child feels sick ill and one of the administrators, or a school nurse will arrive to attend to the student.
Teresa’s mom shared a statement on Facebook feeling hurt and disgusted by the impersonal message sent to her family from the Superintendent.
