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Woman who died of COVID-19 refused to go to hospital, believed it was the flu, worried about bills, her son says
Son said his mother thought she just had the flu
SEAN D. HAMILL
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
shamill@post-gazette.com
MAR 25, 2020
6:58 PM
Ofelia Rousseva thought she just had the flu before she died of COVID-19 on March 19, becoming
the second person in Allegheny County to die of the disease.
Even though the flu conditions were enough that Mrs. Rousseva, 78, slept for most of two days before she died in her son’s home in Greenfield — she had been visiting from her home in Bulgaria since November — she told her son she did not want to go to the hospital
“She didn’t have insurance. She thought she might not be able to pay the bills,” her son, Ludmil Velev, said Wednesday from his hospital bed at UPMC Presbyterian, where he has been treated for COVID-19 since Monday. “And being a foreigner, she was worried even more
Mr. Velev said he told his mother — a famed women’s choir director in her hometown in Sofia, Bulgaria — that she should go to the hospital.
“She was refusing to go,” said Mr. Velev, 43, a Lyft and Uber driver who has difficulty breathing now. “She thought it was regular flu and that it would get better by itself.”
That was partly because Mr. Velev’s daughter, Isabella, 4, got sick first about two weeks ago “but she went through it fast” and was fine in a couple days. Then his wife, Carmen Blanco, got sick just briefly and was fine in a day
Both he and his mother started getting sick at about the same time around March 12. That was about the time that Mr. Velev said he stopped taking rides for Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing companies he works for.
Woman who died of COVID-19 refused to go to hospital, worried about bills, her son says
da fukk? 
