Provided
March 2 would have been the late Wanda Bailey’s 64th birthday.
Bailey’s sister, the late Patricia Frieson, would have been 62 on Nov. 27, had the retired nurse not succumbed on March 16, 2020, to the novel coronavirus, a disease declared a global pandemic five days earlier.
Frieson, the sixth daughter in an African American family of nine siblings from Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood, became the first person to die of COVID-19 in Illinois.
The nation’s first known COVID death had occurred 5
1⁄
2 weeks earlier, in California.
Tragically, on Mar. 25, just nine days after Frieson’s passing, her sister, Bailey, succumbed to a virus that by then had claimed 26 lives in Illinois — COVID fatalities about to escalate nationwide at an astronomical rate. By the end of May, it had claimed 100,000 lives.