An unvaccinated Detroit couple passed away within hours of each other last week after being hospitalized for COVID-19 complications, leaving seven children behind to grieve their deaths.
Fox 2 Detroit reports Troy Green fell too ill to attend a family trip to Florida. Two days after arriving in Florida, Green's wife, Charletta, was hospitalized with COVID-19 at a local Florida hospital.
As Troy was later hospitalized, the couple spent their anniversary apart in separate hospitals in the ICU, both on ventilators.
Tiki Green, the 44-year-old dad's sister, said after Troy learned "that his wife, you know, maybe not getting better, after he hears she's on a ventilator and she's on it 100% constantly, he basically couldn't take that. He just started having chest pains, and eventually, a couple of hours later, he passed."
Tiki said that while Troy was making a slight recovery, Charletta's health continued to decline, adding that "her lungs were severely damaged, and … they just couldn't do any more for her."
The family confirmed that Troy passed away Tuesday morning, just hours after Charletta passed away on Labor Day.
The unexpected passing of the couple has left the family in shambles, with Tiki telling the outlet how the family expected the couple to return home.
She added that before dying the couple was discussing getting the vaccine, and the family is now focusing on comforting their children.
"We're just telling them that we are here, we love them, and we're going to support them as much as we can," Tiki told the outlet. "And we're just trying to get help for them — because these kids, they didn't ask for this, they didn't expect this."
Tiki is now encouraging her family to get the vaccine.
"I'm like stressing to everybody in my family, [they have to] be vaccinated because I can't do this again," she said. "COVID is taking too many people."
The couple were childhood sweethearts who had been married for 22 years.
The family anticipates holding a double funeral service for the late couple and created a GoFundMe account to cover the expenses, which has raised over $26,000 since launching.
NPR reports unvaccinated people are "11 times more likely" to die from COVID-19, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The study also notes that vaccinated people were nearly five times less likely to get infected and 10 times less likely to get so sick they ended up in the hospital.
The CDC's director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, shared at a White House COVID-19 briefing that the CDC "looked at COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in 13 states and offers further evidence of the power of vaccination."
