“This is the norm for us,” said Shalondra’s younger sister Sherrie Rollins, who spent several years struggling with the undiagnosed endometriosis despite constant doctor’s visits over the issue. Research shows that African Americans have less access to health care, but as the Rollins family say they’ve experienced, they also receive lower quality care when they do use the medical system, one of myriad factors leading to the community’s poorer health outcomes and younger deaths. Despite African Americans representing less than 40 percent of Mississippi’s population, they represented 53 percent of COVID-19 cases and 63 percent of the related deaths through April 22. Shalondra was part of the working class she had diabetes and lacked health insurance at times in her adulthood, factors that made her more susceptible to COVID-19.īut the family said she always managed her health well, rarely got sick and while she worked in low-wage jobs, she was moving towards a rewarding career in education - doing all the right things to improve her life.Īnd yet, she was the first person to die from COVID-19 in Hinds County, just as the state and nation was learning how the black community has been hardest hit by the disease. Shalondra Rollins poses for a photo in November of 2017. Less than an hour later, Cassandra received a call from the hospital chaplain, who told her Shalondra’s heart had stopped while she waited for the hospital to find her a room. They pulled away without turning on the siren or the red and white lights. She said she would call them on her cellphone as soon as she arrived. Shalondra’s eyes widened when the EMTs told the family no one could accompany her to Baptist Medical Center as they loaded her into the vehicle. “The ambulance was driving like it was a normal day, someone coming home from work,” Cassandra said. She had just started complaining that she “felt winded” that morning before collapsing in the shower. Three days earlier, her eldest child, 38-year-old Shalondra Rollins, received positive test results for COVID-19, a respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus. It was traveling so slowly that Cassandra laid on her horn. After her daughter fell suddenly ill, Cassandra Rollins raced towards the northwest Jackson apartment the morning of April 7th and found herself following the ambulance responding to the scene.
0 kommentar(er)
