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A Queens man lost his mother and brother to the coronavirus — within a single tragic day, he told The Post on Friday.
“It’s been devastating,” Lloyd Torres, 49, said through tears. “For those who are walking around thinking life is still normal — it’s not.”
Torres, a hospital administrator at Columbia University Irving Center, said his 73-year-old mom Lolita and 47-year-old brother Louis, a nursing-home worker, started feeling sick at the home they share in Briarwood on April 1.
“[Louis] was aching, not feeling well, really had a hard time going to the subway and back home,” Torres said. “He started to have difficulty breathing, couldn’t keep food down.”
Louis was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Queens in Flushing — where doctors determined he had COVID-19 and pneumonia and placed him on a ventilator. Lolita later called 911 for herself and was rushed to Queens Hospital Center.
Within days, Louis’s kidney function had badly deteriorated, and he died at the hospital Wednesday.
“His heart stopped,” Torres said between sobs. “My brother was way too young.”
Torres’s mom, who also suffered from pneumonia, had died the day before, on Tuesday.
“How did this happen? I just don’t have those answers, nobody knows how or where this was contracted,” Torres said.
To make matters worse, it was nearly impossible to find a funeral home that would lay his loved ones to rest, he said.
“We called around and were met with a very strange responses from ‘No, we can’t’ to ‘It’s impossible’ to ‘You have to join a waitlist,’” he said.
Eventually, he found one in Westchester to take the bodies.
On Wednesday, Torres posted a Facebook tribute to his “loving” mother and brother.
“Today we lost my little brother Louis. He was a generous and sensitive soul, who lived life on his terms. He, like my mom, succumbed to COVID 19,” it read.
Torres now wants people everywhere to know they shouldn’t leave the house without a pressing reason.
“[The] cautionary tale is that we all have to stay at home and do our part. We have to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he said.
