COVID killed her boyfriend, now she preaches vaccines
She turns to his coworkers to urge them to be safe
Solomon Deloach was a young man with a girlfriend he hoped to marry, a 3-year-old son and an ambition to rise to vice president of environmental services for Advocate Aurora Health.
On Tuesday, his girlfriend met with his former co-workers at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center to deliver the message he no longer could.
Get vaccinated against COVID-19. Deloach, who was unvaccinated, was hospitalized with the virus on July 28, just two months after starting a new job at a hospital in Elgin, Ill., as manager of environmental services, commonly called housekeeping. A few days later, his girlfriend since high school, LouNaeha Young, spent hours with him in the intensive care unit.
As she got ready to leave, Deloach asked, “Are you going to be back at 7 a.m.?”
“Yeah,” she told him. “Are you for real?” “Yeah,” she insisted. “I want to start my morning off with you,” he said.
They were his last words to her.
The following day, Aug. 2, Deloach died of COVID-19. He was 26.
Young had just walked through the hospital doors when doctors called to tell her how sorry they were. Her boyfriend hadn’t survived.
“I want Solomon’s story to be known,” she said Tuesday, addressing about 20 of his former co-workers. Even though Deloach had moved twice to new hospitals after his stint at Aurora St. Luke’s, the workers in Milwaukee remembered him well.
Young told them that she has been showing their son, Legend, videotapes of his father every day. She wants the boy to know about the father he will grow up without — what he looked like, how his voice sounded.
Deloach was a determined young man who won Young’s heart after she’d already rejected his first two requests to be his girlfriend. Finally, he showed up at her home in Milwaukee with a card, a little teddy bear and red, orange and purple flowers from Pick ‘n Save.
“This is the third time,” he told her, “but I’ll ask again. Will you be my girlfriend?”
She said, “Yes.”
Young told his co-worker that she did not want any of them to go through the pain she has suffered since Deloach’s loss.
“This is so real, and I need everybody to know that,” she said. “We need to protect ourselves. We need to be honest with ourselves.”
After an emotional meeting with the co-workers, Young walked across the hospital hallway and rolled up the sleeve of her left arm. Pharmacist Cassandra Levetzow then gave Young her first shot of the Pfizer vaccine.
They’d had discussions about getting vaccinated, Young said.
“Oh man. Many times,” she said. But they heard so many lies and so much misinformation.
“It was very confusing,” Young said, “but the conclusion we came to was we were not going to get it.”
After getting hospitalized with COVID-19, Deloach was asked by a doctor if he’d received the vaccine. According to Young, Deloach admitted he had not and the doctor told him, “I’ll bet you will when you get out of the hospital.”
She remembers Deloach saying, “Yes I will.”
As Young told her boyfriend’s story, some of his co-workers added their own.
“I lost my husband to COVID,” said Carmelita Reed, a 46-year-old worker in environmental services. “When I heard about (Deloach) it really hurt my heart.”
“My sister died of COVID,” said Essie Whitley, another worker. “I know what you are going through.”
In death, Solomon Deloach presented a powerful example of the importance of vaccination, and also of the myth that young people are bullet-proof when it comes to the pandemic.
While the vast majority who have died from COVID-19 have been over age 50, the disease has claimed thousands of younger Americans.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 610,000 deaths reported as of Aug. 11 included: 354 people age 17 and under; 2,577 age 18-29; 7,368 age 30-39; and 19,457 age 40-49.
In each of those age groups, deaths from COVID-19 far outnumber those from the flu. More than 17 times as many Americans 18-29 have died of COVID-19 as have died of flu since Jan. 1, 2020. Among those age 40-49, COVID-19 has claimed 38 times more lives than flu.
On Tuesday Deloach’s one-time boss, Scott Hedding, the director of environmental services, described the friendship that had developed between them.
“When I heard he was sick, I asked him how he was doing. He said, ‘I’m in the hospital with COVID and COVIDrelated pneumonia,’ “Hedding recalled, trying to hold back tears.
“My next three texts went unanswered.”