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Coronavirus pandemic

For years, the seven children of Clark Allen believed their father to be indestructible. Whether it was his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or a series of car accidents from his terrible driving, his daughter joked last month that “nothing could kill that man.”

But as oxygen was being pumped into his lungs in a Florida emergency room, Allen, 84, who had been vaccinated against the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> for months, asked daughter Danielle to repeat the surprising diagnosis that still left him in disbelief.

“I was the one who told him he had covid,” she told The Washington Post on Thursday. “The doctor told my dad the first day in the hospital that he was a one-in-a-million case to be in the ER.”

Allen, a breakthrough case of a vaccinated individual who contracted the virus, died of the coronavirus a few days later, on July 22, alone in hospice care. When the time came to write his obituary this month, two of his daughters, Danielle and Nicole Allen-Gentile, wanted to honor their father’s life and express their anger about how they think their vaccinated father got infected.

“He was infected by someone who chose to not get vaccinated and his death was preventable,” <a href="https://obits.nj.com/us/obituaries/hunterdoncountydemocrat/name/clark-allen-obituary?pid=199668599" target=_blank>the obituary reads</a>. “It is the wish of his family that everyone get vaccinated in order to prevent further death, sickness and heartbreak.”

Danielle noted to The Post and the <a href="https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2021/08/19/in-obituary-for-a-vaccinated-man-daughters-share-anger-and-a-plea/" target=_blank>Tampa Bay Times</a>, the first to report the story, that she thinks her father was infected by an unvaccinated individual at Carlisle Palm Beach, an assisted-living facility in Lantana, Fla., where he had been living since last summer. It remains unclear how or when Allen contracted the virus, and whether he was infected at his assisted-living facility.

Cherie Dupor, a spokesperson for Senior Lifestyle, the company that operates Carlisle Palm Beach, told The Post that the facility has implemented safety measures using guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and “other expert sources and health authorities,” and had also adopted “enhanced safety and sanitization protocols as well as robust infection control measures.”

“Our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected by the covid-19 pandemic,” Dupor said in a statement. “The health and well-being [of] our residents and team members are our greatest priority.”

The statement from Senior Lifestyle did not reference Allen or address the concerns from his family over unvaccinated people at the facility.

“It was a relief when he got vaccinated, but the reality was he was around a lot of unvaccinated people,” Danielle, 33, of Portland, Ore., told The Post. “I’m attempting to not be very angry at unvaccinated people and it’s become extremely difficult. We’re all really angry and struggling.”

Allen’s death in Florida underscores the ongoing challenges facing the state that is the American epicenter of a pandemic fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant and the millions who remain unvaccinated. Florida reported more than 23,000 new cases Wednesday, bringing the state’s seven-day average for new infections to 21,831, according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=hp_pandemic" target=_blank>data compiled by The Washington Post</a>. More than 17,000 people in Florida are hospitalized for the virus, accounting for almost 1 out of every 5 hospitalizations in the nation, and about 3,600 people are filling beds in intensive care units.

Nearly 51 percent of the state was fully vaccinated as of Thursday.

Health experts have noted how a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/breakthrough-infections-covid-vaccine/2021/08/17/44ebcaaa-fea0-11eb-85f2-b871803f65e4_story.html" target=_blank>rise in breakthrough infections</a> has been fueled by the delta variant surge and waning immunity. An <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-guidance/?itid=lk_inline_manual_17">internal CDC document</a> first published July 29 by The Post offered a national estimate of 35,000 breakthrough infections a week but did not provide documentation for the estimate.

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Allen was born in 1937 in Trenton, N.J., and played baseball and track and field. He later earned his degree at Springfield College in Massachusetts, according to his obituary, where he participated in the Marine Corps Platoon Leadership program and led the school’s Young Republicans. Danielle, who is not a Republican, remembered years later how her father would jokingly cross out his name on the Christmas card he’d receive from the office of President George W. Bush and write her name on it before sending it to her.

After college, he even had a brief stint as a sports reporter for The Post before transitioning into a career in advertising and marketing for consumer packaged goods. He’d later be a baseball umpire and football official in Connecticut and was also an election official in Palm Beach County, Fla.

Those who knew Allen best recognized how formal he was at all times — the kind of guy who would wear a suit when everyone else was in T-shirts. But he loved a good joke. He’d email his seven children saying he was going to give them each $100,000, only for them to realize much later in the note that this would come “when my Powerball ticket wins.” Allen built PowerPoint presentations for all occasions — Nicole’s wedding had one filled with embarrassing photos, and another during Christmas showed images of the father sipping on cocktails.

“He did a lot of stuff like that with us that was playful,” Danielle said.

Courtesy: Danielle Allen

So when the pandemic began to unfold in the U.S., the family worried that their father, whose lungs had been damaged for decades from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, would suffer if he did not remain active. Allen had taken the virus seriously from the start, and his daughters sent him masks and gloves, but they knew more needed to be done.

“We all talked and we were so scared because it was very obvious that if he got covid he was not going to survive,” Danielle told The Post.

With Danielle in Portland and Nicole, 38, in Greenwich, Conn., they knew at some point he would need to move into assisted living. As the family weighed whether Allen should be in a facility in Florida or Connecticut, Danielle recalled the blunt message given to the daughters by a Connecticut facility: You need to get him out of Florida. He will die in Florida.

Danielle said her father last summer picked the Carlisle Palm Beach, about 10 miles south of West Palm Beach, wanting to stay in state instead of move during a pandemic. She told The Post that her father relayed to her at one point how around 40 percent of the staff was vaccinated, and servers in the cafeteria were unmasked. Senior Lifestyle did not respond to a question about their policies surrounding vaccination and masking.

“When we were seeing all the numbers coming out of Florida, that was terrifying, to be honest,” she said.

On Jan. 6, hours before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Allen, who had already denounced President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), wrote an email to his daughters with a subject line that read, “VACCINATION.” After the Carlisle Palm Beach had announced that it would offer vaccines to residents and employees, Allen had scheduled his first shot for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in a week.

“Paperwork completed,” he wrote. “Arm ready!”

Allen remained cautious in the months after his second dose in February, only venturing out to go grocery shopping, walk in a nearby nature park or sit in a favorite spot by the ocean. He did not go many places, which made life at Carlisle Palm Beach stressful, his daughter said.

“He was scared, even after getting vaccinated,” Danielle said. “He hated the handling of the vaccine in Florida.”

Those fears grew in the early morning hours of July 8, when the assisted-living facility informed the family that their father was at the hospital. When a nurse at JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Fla., told the daughters that Allen had contracted the coronavirus, Danielle could only respond with, “What?” She told the hospital that he had been vaccinated, making him their first admitted breakthrough patient.

He was released from the hospital after four days, but less than 12 hours later, breathing and cognitive issues sent him back to the hospital on July 13. He tried to keep his daughters upbeat when they checked on him, telling them in a group text message that he was “almost set to participate in [the] Olympics.”

The laughter was short-lived. His condition worsened to the point that Allen, wearing a BiPap mask that pumped oxygen into his lungs, said goodbye to his family over FaceTime on July 17 — with all of them waving, crying, telling each other they loved each other.

Allen was moved to hospice and was “delirious and in pain,” his daughter said. Danielle visited hospice on the morning of July 22 to say goodbye one more time. Her father was not awake, but she said talking to him through the hospice window was necessary, albeit crushing.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do,” she said.

Three hours later, she was inside her dad’s apartment when she got the call that he had died. The youngest of Allen’s seven children wonders what might have been if he were in a different state: “If he was in Connecticut or Oregon, he’d most likely still be alive.”

The family was grieving when Danielle was emailed an attachment and a note from Nicole saying, “Don’t work on this if you’re not up to it.” In the attachment was a rough draft of their father’s obituary that began: Clark died of Covid. insert info about being vaccinated but an unvaxed person killing him&gt;.

The sisters were enraged, but also adamant about wanting people to know what happened. Thanking the nurses for being with him in this month’s obituary was their way of reminding others that he was alone and away from his family.

“We didn’t want his death to be something that got passed by,” Danielle said. “We want people to get vaccinated and know how this happened.”

The family is still trying to find its footing nearly a month after Allen’s death. Nicole told The Post that she was “heartbroken” he was taken from his 17 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Danielle said she recently got into a fight with her partner that ended with her erratically yelling, “I can’t lose anybody else to covid!” She recognizes that her father was already fighting a terminal illness, but said that he had more life to live — and this was not the way it was supposed to end.

“He could have seen his family again,” she said. “He didn’t need to die this way.”

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/08/18/texas-masks-paris-dresscode-abbott/?itid=lk_inline_manual_36">Texas school district adds masks to dress code, finding possible loophole in Abbott’s ban</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/covid-vaccine-effectiveness/?itid=lk_inline_manual_37">Vaccines show declining effectiveness overall but strong protection against hospitalization amid delta</a>

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/18/cdc-data-delay-delta-variant/?itid=lk_inline_manual_38">How CDC data problems put U.S. behind on delta</a>

Timothy Bella was a staff writer and editor for the General Assignment team, focusing on national news. His work has appeared in outlets such as Esquire, the Atlantic, New York magazine and the Undefeated.