KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 3 — A 17-year-old girl in Missouri, who survived cancer three times, has died from Covid-19 complications.
Aspen Deke from Kansas City was diagnosed with the Philadelphia chromosome-positive, a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, at the age of four where she was given a dire prognosis.
According to US station Fox 4, the Fort Osage High School junior was diagnosed with Covid-19 in November.
Her parents said Aspen went through four years of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, but Covid-19 was much worse than cancer.
“At least with cancer, as bad as it sounds and it is scary, but there’s a lot that you know about it. They can say, ‘this is how bad it is, this is what we are going to do. This is what we expect.’ But with this everything is unknown,” her father Eric told the station.
Aspen was admitted to Children’s Mercy Hospital almost two weeks before Christmas, and has been in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit since New Year’s Eve with most of that time spent intubated on a ventilator.
The US has recorded over 440,000 Covid-19 deaths, with over 95,000 lives lost in January alone.
