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A Texas lady has died of problems from the unique coronavirus 102 years after her sister died of the Spanish Influenza. Selma Ryan, who was not yet born when her 5-year-old sis, Esther Hoeffner, passed away in 1918, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Austin, reports KXAN. She was96 Ryan’s daughter, Vicki Spencer, discovered that her mother had a fever on April 3. “Over the next 5 days I saw through the window as she got sicker and sicker.” Spencer states relative gathered outside her mother’s window to celebrate her 96 th birthday on April11 But “I understood she was seriously ill,” she tells WOAI. “I understood she would not make it through.”.
Ryan passed away three days later April14 It was only then that she was tested for COVID-19, and a possible outcome returned. Spencer says the death adds a somber note to a household story currently marked by a pandemic. The death of Ryan’s sibling was “a truly substantial and unfortunate part of our family history,” Spencer informs WOAI. “The best sadness of [her parents’] life was losing their little child to that influenza epidemic.” An approximated 500 million individuals were infected worldwide, a tenth of whom passed away. Some 675,000 deaths occurred in the United States. There have now been more than 825,000 coronavirus cases in the US, with more than 45,000 deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally. (Find out more coronavirus stories.)