A fully vaccinated Michigan couple died of COVID-19 — less than one minute apart and while holding hands, according to their daughter.
Grand Rapids residents Cal Dunham, 59, and his wife Linda, 66, who had pre-existing health conditions, began to feel sick during a family camping trip this month, Fox 17 reported.
“[My dad] called me before our family camping trip and said he wasn’t feeling good but he thinks it’s just like sinus, and [Linda] caught it and she’s like, ‘He gave me his cold,’” their daughter Sarah Dunham told the outlet.
“The third day they woke me up and said, ‘We’ve got to go because we don’t feel well.’ So I packed them all up and they left,” she said.
Within days, their conditions deteriorated and they ended up on ventilators. On Monday, they died after being taken off life support – Cal at 11:07 a.m. and Linda less than a minute later.
They held each other’s hands as they passed away in tandem.
“She always joked and said, ‘Well, you’re going to go before I am, I’ll be right there behind you, I promise.’ And she really was, like she really was right there behind him,” Sarah told Fox 17.
“The love that they found together after a previous marriage is fantastic,” she said. “They were the people that you just looked at and you were like, ‘I want to be old like that, I want that love when I’m that age.’”
The grieving daughter also expressed her frustration that many people don’t take the deadly bug seriously.
“I’m angry because so many people are like, ‘If I catch COVID, I catch COVID, that’s what it is.’ No, it’s not,” she said.
“It could be any person — it could be anybody. They did everything right, they did everything to protocol the way it should be done.”
It is unclear what underlying health issues the couple had.