#Minnesota mom dies of COVID-19 weeks after giving birth on ventilator

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Aurora Chacon Esparza with her baby, Andrea
GoFundMe

A Minnesota mom died of the coronavirus without ever meeting her new daughter — after giving birth by emergency C-section while on a ventilator at the hospital, according to the family and a new report.

Aurora Chacon Esparza, 35, was seven months pregnant when she started showing COVID-19 symptoms and went to be tested — but the results came back negative, her husband Juan Duran wrote on a GoFundMe page.

She called her primary care doctor and was asked to stay home, as the tests are not always accurate.

But her symptoms only got worse, and she went to the hospital on June 14, where she was admitted immediately, according to Duran. By June 23, her oxygen plummeted to the point that a C-section was required to save both her life and that of the baby.

“That’s when it hit me,” Duran told local station KMSP-TV at the time. “I was thinking, ‘OK, she’s going to get through this, a few days at the hospital.’ But when I received that phone call, it just hit me.”

Esparza delivered a baby girl, named Andrea, while on a ventilator.

“Fortunately the C-section had no complications,” Duran wrote on the GoFundMe page. “My daughter was born at 30 weeks gestation but luckily she is doing very well.”

Esparza initially showed signs of improvement, but her condition took a turn for the worse on July 7.

Doctors told Duran a last resort would be to get Esparza on an ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, machine which performs the functions of the heart and lungs from outside the body.

But North Memorial Hospital, where Esparza was being treated, is not an ECMO center and requests for a transfer to another hospital were denied, Duran told the local station.

“Since Aurora has been on the ventilator for more than seven days, the ECMO machine would do more damage than help, according to the medical providers,” Duran wrote on the GoFundMe page.

Esparza died nearly two weeks later, on Sunday.

“She is a 35-year-old healthy woman with no pre-existing conditions,” Duran told the station, prior to his wife’s death. “We never thought this could happen to our family.”

The couple’s newborn daughter Andrea was progressing well in the NICU, he said at the time.

“She’s four pounds, two ounces now and her heart is doing great,” Duran said. “She can breathe by herself. She eats, she smiles, she cries.”