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PBS Kristin Urquiza at the Democratic National Convention on Monday
Among high-level politicians who spoke on Monday’s opening night of the Democratic National Convention, one who lost her father to COVID-19 coronavirus disease sent a touching and punctual message to the rest of the country.
“My father was a healthy 65-year-old man. His only pre-existing condition was to accept as true with Donald Trump,” Kristin Urquiza said, speaking from home. “And for that, he paid with his life.”
Mark Anthony Urquiza, Kristin’s father, died on June 30 from COVID-19.
Urquiza was one of the few people to go public, and it was news for writing obituaries for members of the circle of relatives who died from the virus. Those memories have blamed Trump and other prominent Republicans for the deaths, largely because of the president’s contradictory and dismissive attitude toward the pandemic.
Biden reportedly contacted Kristin to invite her to communicate with her father on Monday night.
“He trusted Donald Trump,” he said in a remote appearance at the virtual rally. “He voted for him, listened to him and believed him and his spokesmen, when they said that the coronavirus was under control and that it was going to go away, that it was general to end the social estrangement regulations before it was safe and if there were no underlying fitness problems. you’d probably be fine.”
Trump defended his strategy with a variety of tactics, claiming that states had groped where he had not, saying that the virus was not predictable and saying that the actions he had taken, such as restricting travel abroad, had stored countless more lives.
“Compared to the maximum of other countries, which are suffering enormously, we are doing very well, and we have done things that few countries may have done!” tweeted in July.
Kristin said Monday that after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey lifted orders to stay at his state’s home on May 15, her father went to a karaoke bar where he is believed to have the virus.
“A few weeks later, he put on a fan,” he said. “And after five painful days, he died alone in the intensive care unit with a nurse in his hand.
While old and new Democratic lawmakers will line up this week in the virtual DNC to criticize Trump for everything from his questionable rhetoric to his clumsy handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristin’s choice to speak was intended, in part, to personalize the magnitude of losses across the country in recent months.
He also highlighted the disproportionate effect of the virus on communities of color in the United States.
“The coronavirus has evidently shown that there are two Americas: the America in which Donald Trump lives and the America my father died in,” he said Monday.
At least 170,100 other people died of COVID-19 when their speech aired Monday night, according to a New York Times tracker.
RELATED: Texas writes Viral Obit naming President Trump over her husband’s ‘unnecessary death’ in COVID-19
The Arizona native, who now lives in San Francisco, told the Republic of Arizona in July that she blamed Governor Ducey for her father’s death in her obituary because she sought out lawmakers to see that coronavirus deaths weren’t just numbers.
He said on Monday that once he told his story, “many other people contacted me to express the percentage of theirs.”
A wave of obituaries like yours published this summer.
Stacey Nagy, a Texas woman who blamed Trump on her husband’s obituary, told PEOPLE in August that she was looking for others to know who she blamed for her husband’s death.
“I’m very angry about that, ” said Nagy, 72.
“He is the love of my life for crying out loud. I get angry,” Nagy said of her deceased husband, David, who died of COVID-19 at 79.
Nagy then added that “all of this is so useless” and that he discovered that “it’s hard to pay attention to what Trump said, to see Trump forget all this and minimize it from the beginning and do nothing about it.”
“It’s because of your attitude that this whole coronavirus thing has a political character,” Nagy added.
RELATED: Hospital employee’s daughter urges Texas governor to attend COVID-19 funeral: ‘My mom counted’
Nagy blamed Texas Governor Jim Abbott, as Fiana Tulip did in Isabelle Odette Papadette Papadimitriou’s obituary in July.
Tulip wrote in his mother’s obituary that the “inaction and active denial” of the virus by the Republican governor “have an effect on” has obviously shown that the deaths of other people and the families they leave are just numbers for you.
Tulip said he invited the governor of Texas to attend his mother’s funeral, as Kristin Urquiza had invited the Republican leader from Arizona to attend his father’s funeral. Neither of us attended.
“My mom’s loss is huge,” Tulip told PEOPLE. “I know at my center that it can be prevented.”