As a matriarch lay dying of coronavirus, all her family

Fears over spread of COVID-19 are preventing hospitals from permitting visitors

LOS ANGELES— Hector Juarez said goodbye to his mother through the window as he stood outside Delano Regional Medical Center on Thursday.

Susana Garcia, 52, was hooked up to a ventilator and heavily sedated as COVID-19 ravaged her body. Fears over the spread of the highly contagious coronavirus meant that she was in isolation and the hospital was not allowing visitors.

But staffers opened the blinds so Juarez and his sister could peer inside Garcia’s ground-floor ICU room.

“We got to see her one last time,” said Juarez, 27.

Garcia died at 2:10 a.m. Friday, becoming the first Kern County resident whose death was attributed to the virus.

Weeks earlier, she had been celebrating with family.

They gathered in San Jose for her mother’s 68th birthday on March 7. It felt especially important to come together, Juarez said, because his grandfather had died about a month before. Though Santa Clara County was emerging as an early hotbed of the virus, at the time it had reported just 32 cases. It was days before the county began prohibiting even public gatherings, and more than a week before it issued an order directing residents to stay at home.

When Garcia returned to her Delano home March 13, she had a cough and runny nose that she shook off as allergies. Over the next five days, her symptoms grew to include a fever, cold sweats and crushing fatigue.

By March 18, she felt she could no longer breathe, Juarez said. A family member took her to the emergency room, and she was admitted into the ICU that night. The following day, she was tested for COVID-19. Her results came back positive six days later.

In the meantime, her decline was steady and unsparing. Medication to keep her fever down didn’t seem to work, nor did the cooling blankets she was wrapped in. Her temperature soared past 105 degrees. Chest X-rays showed that her lungs were declining. She was given an oxygen mask.

On Tuesday, she called Juarez’s sister to say that she was afraid, Juarez said.

“She was very scared for her life because she was having a lot of trouble breathing,” he said. “She knew at that point that something was completely wrong.”

Then the hospital held a conference call with Garcia and her family during which doctors said her body wasn’t getting enough oxygen and that she needed to be put on a ventilator.

“We let her know, ‘Mom, it’s going to be OK. We’re going to be waiting for you here once you get your lungs healthy again and we’ll all be able to be together at home soon,’ ” Juarez said. “That was the last time we spoke to my mom.”

The family made the difficult decision to have Garcia intubated.

Juarez and his sister, who live about 30 minutes away in Bakersfield, rushed to the hospital to see their mother before she was placed on the machine. But by the time they arrived, Garcia had already been sedated, Juarez said.

That was the first time they saw her through the window. Two days later was the last time. Three days later she was gone.

The oldest of seven siblings, Garcia is also survived by her mother, her daughter, two sons and five granddaughters.

She had a history of medical conditions, including diabetes and cardiac