Paola Regina De Simone, a university professor in Argentina, collapsed suddenly in front of her students in the middle of a virtual class, and died shortly afterwards from complications of the coronavirus last week.
The college educator began to struggle to breathe in the middle of a lecture conducted on Zoom on September 2. Ana Breccia, one of the students in the class, said that she and her classmates “were the last people with whom she spoke. She started saying that she had pneumonia, she looked worse than in previous classes. At one moment she couldn’t keep changing the slides, not even talk, and she collapsed,” reports People en Español.
The Washington Post reports that her students asked De Simone for her address so that they could call an ambulance, but she said “I can’t.” Breccia shared that the students stayed on the call with their professor until her husband arrived.
University student Juan Manuel Jarupkin said “she was my professor and today I had my last class. My classmates and I are astounded.”
The government and international relations professor, who had been experiencing respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 for several weeks prior to her death, had been at the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa for 15 years, said the school in a statement.
Days earlier, De Simone had shared on Twitter that she had been sick “for more than 4 weeks and the symptoms won’t go away.” Her husband, a doctor, was “overwhelmed by how much he has been working lately” she wrote.
Facundo Cruz, De Simone’s colleague at the university, wrote on Twitter after she died that despite her COVID-19 symptoms, she had continued to teach. “Even yesterday she was teaching a class with a cough. Yes, a cough,” he shared.
“I want to share the luck I had in knowing her personally and then affirm that every student that passed through her classrooms, every colleague that worked on a project with her, each peer that had her in their office took with them her human quality,” Cruz wrote. “Human, above all else.”
LISTEN NOW on the RADIO.COM App
Follow RADIO.COM
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
