Behind every number in the statistics of deaths from COVID‑19, there is a grieving family that lost a parent, grandparent, child or partner.
The deadly COVID‑19 pandemic has already killed more than 70,000 Ukrainians. Many of them died alone in the infectious disease wards, isolated from their loved ones.
They have left their families with a gut-wrenching tragedy that they may not ever recover from. Some Ukrainians have even endured the loss multiple times as the virus has killed several members of their families.
The death toll continues to rise: Ukraine has seen a record 734 patients who died in a single day on Oct. 26. The peak is yet to come, the authorities predict.
Mass vaccination is now the only effective tool to battle the pandemic and reduce the number of COVID‑19 deaths. While the entire adult population could get a jab for free throughout Ukraine since late July, only 7.7 million out of 42 million citizens, or 18% of the population, are fully vaccinated as of Nov. 3.
Ukraine’s vaccination rate remains the lowest in Europe. Its death toll, on the other hand, is among the highest in the world.
The Kyiv Post spoke with Ukrainians who lost their loved ones to COVID‑19.
Associate professor Olga Grabar died of COVID-19 on Nov. 16, 2020, at the age of 39. (Courtesy)
Losing a daughter
It’s been almost a year since Ukrainian Ivan Grabar lost his oldest daughter, Olga Grabar, to COVID‑19. He hasn’t stopped thinking about her even for a moment ever since.
“The father’s heart can never get used to this loss,” Grabar told the Kyiv Post.
Grabar is a doctor of sciences and a professor. He says he and his daughter were very close. She was following in his footsteps by engaging in science and technologies and becoming an associate professor at a local technical university in their native Zhytomyr, a city of 260,000 people some 140 kilometers west from Kyiv.
The two were working on a book about fractal ornaments in graphic design together. But she never saw it published, as the book came out soon after her death.
The family has taken the COVID‑19 pandemic very seriously since its very beginning. They have been following all quarantine rules and even installed ultraviolet lamps to disinfect their homes. They all were quite worried when Olga Grabar lost the sense of taste and smell in late October 2020.
She experienced mild symptoms at first and had some fever. But her condition deteriorated soon and she was hospitalized with pneumonia several days after the first symptoms.
Grabar says he doesn’t know how and when she could have gotten the infection. He also doesn’t know much about his daughter’s course of the disease, as he wasn’t allowed to her ward and wasn’t informed about her condition by the hospital’s staff.
With low level of oxygen in her blood, Grabar’s daughter needed a lung ventilator and oxygen to survive. But there were some “constant interruptions” in the supply of oxygen to the hospital back then, he says.
On Nov. 15, his daughter wrote a Facebook post asking Zhytomyr’s mayor to fix the oxygen shortage, saying that getting oxygen was “their only chance to survive.” It was her last post.
Having spent around two weeks at the hospital, Olga Grabar died the following day at the age of 39, isolated from her family, with no chance to say goodbye.
Officials would later deny the interruption of oxygen supply in that Zhytomyr hospital, saying that she was in a rather serious condition, which made it impossible to save her life.
But if it wasn’t for interrupted oxygen supply, Grabar says, his daughter might have survived. Back then, there was no vaccine available in Ukraine that could have saved his daughter as well.
The hardest part for the family was to tell Grabar’s 12-year-old grandson Artem about his mother’s death.
“He cried a lot,” Grabar says. “Artem misses his mother a lot and I can’t compensate for this loss, even though I try hard.”
Graphite manufacturing plant employee Oleksandr Ostapenko (L) died of COVID-19 on Feb. 4, 2021, at the age of 61. (Courtesy)
Losing a father
The distance didn’t matter for Kyiv journalist Anatoliy Ostapenko and his father, Oleksandr Ostapenko, who lived in Zaporizhia, a city of nearly 800,000 people located 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. The two used to talk almost every day.
It was the common interest in politics that has helped in strengthening their father-son relationship, Ostapenko says.
He hasn’t been able to call his father for their regular chats for 10 months now.
“I miss him a lot,” Ostapenko told the Kyiv Post.
Ostapenko says his father was a kind man who adored his grandchildren and was fond of fishing, “like many of his age in Zaporizhia.” He has been working at the local graphite manufacturing plant for about a decade, which affected his health significantly. Ostapenko’s father had chronic bronchitis along with heart conditions that could have affected the severity of his COVID‑19 infection.
His father suffered a stroke in late 2020. It wasn’t a bad one. He could still walk and talk independently and only spent a week at a hospital. But three weeks after he was discharged, his state started to deteriorate with fluid retention setting in. It’s a condition when excess fluid builds up in the body. He had to be hospitalized again.
When he was admitted to the hospital, doctors checked his lungs and since there was some liquid in them, they decided to put Ostapenko in the COVID‑19 clinic, without testing him for the infection.
“He was hospitalized on Friday, but test results arrived only on Monday,” Ostapenko says. “It was negative.”
Although he was immediately transferred to a non-coronavirus clinic, three days spent at the COVID‑19 hospital were fatal: Ostapenko’s father began to suffer from convulsions and low blood pressure and had a second stroke. He was discharged from the hospital despite that.
Ostapenko’s father tested positive for COVID‑19 the day after.
The doctors transferred him back to the COVID‑19 hospital where he died on Feb. 4. He was 61.
“It all happened so fast,” Ostapenko says, adding that he believes his father would have been alive even after the strokes if it wasn’t for COVID‑19.
Ostapenko’s mother, who had been taking care of her husband while he was in the hospital, also tested positive for COVID‑19. So did his 89-year-old grandfather, who lived with the family at that time. He died from COVID‑19 complications.
The funeral of his father was one of the most trying experiences in Ostapenko’s life.
“Your mother is crying, your sister is crying, and you can’t even hug them because they are COVID-positive and you are not,” he says. “It’s a horrible picture.”
Pediatrician Tamara Boldyreva died of COVID-19 on Oct. 27, 2021, at the age of 82. (Courtesy)
Losing a mother
Odesa resident Oleksandr Boldyrev says his mother, Tamara Boldyreva, was never indifferent to people’s misfortunes. As a pediatrician, she spent all her spare time taking care of sick children.
“She was a good person,” Boldyrev told the Kyiv Post.
Boldyrev’s parents lived together in Yuzhne, a small city of over 30,000 people some 50 kilometers from the southern provincial capital of Odesa. His father died of cancer in 2019, and his mother was living alone ever since.
She was feeling quite depressed after her husband’s death. Shortly before her own death, she just started to recover from the loss, making some plans for the future.
In late October, she surprised her son with a phone call, saying she tested positive for COVID‑19. Several days after that, she was hospitalized with low oxygen saturation, after the infection had already damaged 60% of her lungs.
Boldyrev saw his mother for the last time as she was taken from the ambulance to the hospital.
“I told her that everything was going to be alright.”
It was the last words he said to his mother. Around six days since she tested positive, she died on Oct. 27, at the age of 82.
Boldyrev says he was encouraging his mother to get a jab as soon as vaccination started. She kept refusing, saying that she would rather protect herself by spending most of the time at home. That didn’t help.
His mother had a diary where she used to write about her health and everyday routine. He found it shortly after her death. It turned out she went to a dentist shortly before discovering she got infected. Boldyrev assumes that’s when she might have gotten infected.
He says he will regret not insisting on her getting vaccinated until the rest of his days.
Armed Forces medical services colonel Ivan Gayda died of COVID-19 on June 18, 2020, at the age of 58. (Courtesy)
Losing a husband
Lviv residents Olga Gayda and Ivan Gayda were married for 35 years. There was no bigger joy for the couple than family gatherings, with a home filled with the laughter of their children and grandchildren.
That was before COVID‑19. Months after the pandemic has swept Ukraine, the disease took Gayda’s husband’s life.
“He was an extraordinary man,” she told the Kyiv Post.
A colonel of the medical service of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, he headed a military medical center of western Ukraine for the past 10 years. This was a major medical and diagnostic hospital in the provincial capital of Lviv. He knew all his employees by their names and cared about them deeply, Gayda says.
Although there was much skepticism about coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, Gayda imposed the required precautions in the hospital to protect the personnel and the customers.
“He invested a lot of his effort and energy in the hospital,” Gayda says.
Her husband didn’t smoke or drink alcohol and followed a healthy lifestyle, so there was no sign of trouble before that warm Sunday afternoon in late May: He started to feel bad as he had just returned from one of the regular work trips across the region. Gayda went to work the next day to get tested for COVID‑19 and spent the night at the hospital so that he didn’t infect his relatives in case he was infected.
He tested positive and was hospitalized with lung inflammation the next day. Gayda says she and her daughter tested positive in a couple of days as well. Unlike her husband, the two only got a fever and a slight cough.
Gayda recalls her husband coughing badly. After a week of treatment in Lviv, he was transferred by plane to Kyiv. Because of COVID‑19 pneumonia and low level of oxygen in his blood, he had to be supported with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO.
But it didn’t save him.
He died at Kyiv’s Oleksandrivska hospital on June 18, after over two weeks of battling the severe disease. He was 58.
“It was a bolt from the blue for us,” Gayda says. “We knew it was a terrible disease but didn’t fully understand how much.”
Both she and her daughter could not attend the funeral since they were still ill.
Another tragedy followed shortly: His brother, surgeon Oleg Gayda, died of COVID‑19 on July 1. He wasn’t present at the funeral as well since he was feeling bad at that time already.
“This disease can affect anyone,” Gayda says, adding that their whole family is vaccinated now. She regrets her husband didn’t make it until the vaccine was made available.
“Vaccine doesn’t save from getting infected but it at least gives a chance for survival,” Gayda says. “If only it appeared earlier…”
