Special to The Times
At 83 years old, Gerald Hobson still managed to work full time as a security guard in the lobby of a short-term care facility near Cleveland.
Then came COVID-19, a new respiratory disease first identified in Wuhan, China in late 2019. It quickly depleted Hobson’s systems of oxygen, requiring hospitalization, intubation, and ventilation.
He died May 23, 2020 at TriPoint Medical Center in Concord Twp., Ohio. The Mayfield native and Korean War veteran, known to be cheerful and quick to laughter, was gone.
“There are no words. It was like two weeks of solid hell,” said his daughter, Valerie Leonard, of her father’s time in the hospital.