Nurse loses mom, husband to COVID-19 in Oklahoma. ‘Our family didn’t have to be gutted’

Lizanne Jennings says she tried to reassure her husband, Dennis Davis, about her sick mother as he lay dying of COVID-19 in an Oklahoma City hospital.

“I said, ‘OK. Mom’s fine. She’s back at the house. She’s going to stay with me,’” Jennings, an ICU nurse, told CNN.

But her 78-year-old mother, Linda Jennings, had died of the coronavirus three days earlier after telling her daughter, “I can’t do this anymore,” The New York Times reported.

“Because I knew he would keep fighting if I told him my mom had already died,” Jennings told CNN. Davis told her that he was ready to be at peace, she recounted, and died 30 minutes later. She bathed his body and cut his hair.

“I couldn’t save either one of them,” a tearful Jennings told CNN, saying her family had taken every precaution. “It didn’t have to be this way.... Our family didn’t have to be gutted.”

Months earlier, in the early days of the pandemic, Jennings had warned her loved ones of the stringent steps necessary to protect themselves, The New York Times reported.

“People we know, people we love — our family, our friends — people are going to get this virus,” she told Davis, a machinist and former bodybuilder, in March, according to the publication. “And people we know are going to die.”

More than 63 million cases of the COVID-19 virus have been confirmed worldwide with more than 1.4 million deaths as of Dec. 1, according to Johns Hopkins University. The United States has more than 13.6 million confirmed cases with more than 269,000 deaths.

More than 199,000 people in Oklahoma have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 1,700 people have died from complications of the virus in the state, the Oklahoma State Department of Health reported.

More than 1,700 new cases of COVID-19 and 15 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours, according to the state.

This story was originally published December 1, 2020 at 2:19 PM with the headline "Nurse loses mom, husband to COVID-19 in Oklahoma. ‘Our family didn’t have to be gutted’."