Zully was about 8 months pregnant when she started coughing and breathing.
Then came hospitalization, diagnosis of COVID-19 and news that the baby’s oxygen levels were dropping, had to be delivered weeks earlier.
For Zully and her family, who emigrated to Stamford, Connecticut from Guatemala, it was a time of crisis: her husband, Marvin, and her seven-year-old son, Junior, would also be inflamed with coronavirus, meaning that once the baby was born, it would not be for him to return home.
“I’d have my son’s killer,” Marvin says.
Zully (above, left) had nowhere to go. In early April, just before giving birth with a ventilator and getting into a coma that would last about 3 weeks, she desperately called Luciana Lira, her eldest son’s second-language English instructor (top, right), herself an immigrant, saying Marvin and Junior needed help.
Lira didn’t hesitate. In the end, he would take the baby, Neysel, home with him from the virus while his mother, father and brother recovered.
“I’m in a position to help 100%,” the instructor recalls.
His story takes place in Love, Life – the Virus, a documentary directed through Oscar Guerra that arrives at FRONTLINE on Tuesday, August 11. A Spanish edition in collaboration with FRONTLINE will be broadcast by Aqui y Ahora de Univision next Sunday.
In turn, heartbreaking and comforting, Love, Life – the Virus tells how Stamford’s network intervened to help Zully and his circle of relatives in their hour of need. In the clip above, watch the doctors and nurses at Stamford Hospital describe the severity of Zully’s COVID-19 case and the uncertainties she presented for her baby, and as Lira takes newborn Neysel in her arms and home while the rest of her family circle fights the coronavirus.
“This baby would have had nothing if he had come home to his father with COVID-19 and Junior,” Lira told FRONTLINE in the clip above. “It’s just a premature baby.”
To see the full story, see Love, Life – the Virus, a hard look at finding a family to gather and the network members who helped make this possible.
“Maybe if I’d been to Guatemala,” Zully says in the film, “I probably wouldn’t have taken a step forward and I wouldn’t have told that story.”
FrontLINE’s two-part time with Love, Life and the Virus (as well as a moment-by-segment, Udocumented in the Pandemic, with The Marshall Project and the Pulitzer Center) will begin on Tuesday, August 11 and will be completed on pbs.org/frontline and the 7/6c PBS video app. The time will premiere on PBS stations (see local lists) and on YouTube at 10/9c. A Spanish edition of Love, Life – the Virus will be broadcast in Univision Aquio’s current affairs magazine and Now on Sunday, August 16 at 7/6 am.
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