A 20-year-old mother of two diagnosed with the flu died just 24 hours later after pneumonia quickly set in.
Alani Murrieta of Phoenix, Arizona, had been feeling sick since leaving work early on Sunday, KSAZ reported. When she still felt ill on Monday, her sister took her and her two sons, ages 2 and 6 months, to an urgent care center where they were diagnosed with the flu and sent home with medication.
By Tuesday morning, Murrieta could barely breathe and her mother took her to the hospital around 7:30 a.m., the New York Daily News reported. She was diagnosed with pneumonia and put on a ventilator. By 3:25 p.m., Murrieta's heart stopped and she died.
“Never in a million years would we have thought that we would have lost her that day like this,” Murietta’s aunt Stephanie Gonzales said, the Daily News reported.
Murietta had no pre-existing conditions before getting the flu, the Daily News reported. Her family said she was healthy and hardly ever got sick.
The CDC is reporting some states already have high levels of flu activity early in the season, with numbers of new cases rising each week. In Australia, which has already had its flu season, the current vaccine was only 10 percent effective against H3N2, the predominant strain of flu expected this season, ABC13 reported.
Southern states are seeing earlier cases in much higher numbers; Galveston County, Texas, for example, has had 286 cases so far this year. At this time last year, only 32 cases had been reported.
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Murrieta's family pay for funeral expenses.