Losing her father and aunt to the pandemic was surreal for Lorraine Caggiano. It all occurred within two weeks of returning to New York from a wedding in Connecticut, before the lockdown restrictions.
Her mother was the first to exhibit symptoms, coming down with a fever on March 12. After receiving emergency care where she tested negative for strep throat and the common flu, she was tested for COVID-19 and told to self-isolate for a week.
During the isolation period, Caggiano brought her 83-year-old father to live with her family out of precaution. But it was already too late. Four days later her father woke up feeling confused and unwell.
“At some point, he couldn’t even put one foot in front of the other to walk into the shower, and he was breathing heavily, so we said, ‘Okay something is wrong here,’” Caggiano told The Epoch Times.
Caggiano’s father was taken to the hospital where he passed away on March 28 from COVID-19-related complications. That was just days after she lost her aunt to the same disease.
“I never saw my father in the hospital because we weren’t allowed to go, obviously. I didn’t see him in a casket because we couldn’t have a wake. We couldn’t have anything,” she said.
Caggiano, who was sick with a fever for 12 days herself, is now demanding answers on how the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, quickly ballooned into a global pandemic.
She is one of the many plaintiffs who joined Florida-based Berman Law Group’s class-action lawsuit seeking damages from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over its handling of the outbreak of the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
“What I’m hoping to come out of it is some accountability and some clarity and some truth to see what really, really happened,” Caggiano said. “And to see how moving forward we can prevent such a thing. I mean, the world has been turned on its ear—it’s insane.”
Like Caggiano, many Americans have joined similar class-action lawsuits around the country to demand answers and reparations over the Chinese regime’s role in the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, around the world, calls for accountability and answers from the regime are also mounting.
At least six class-action lawsuits have been filed by individuals or businesses in U.S. federal courts against the regime, including ones in Florida, Texas, Nevada, and California. Attorneys general of Missouri and Mississippi have filed separate lawsuits against the Chinese regime on behalf of their states, with other states expressing interest in following suit.
Globally, similar lawsuits have also been filed in Italy, Nigeria, Egypt, and Argentina.
Many of those lawsuits allege that the communist regime’s pattern of suppressing information, threatening whistleblowers, and misrepresenting the severity of the disease between mid-December and mid-January had caused or contributed to the spread of the virus, resulting in sweeping human and economic devastation.
Previous reporting by The Epoch Times citing research, interviews with Wuhan locals, and internal government reports have revealed that Chinese authorities have been significantly downplaying the severity of the outbreak. Meanwhile, some legal experts have said that Beijing could potentially be held legally responsible under international law for the alleged coverup and mishandling of the virus.
David Adams
Article URL : https://www.theepochtimes.com/global-demand-seeking-justice-answers-from-beijing-over-pandemic-grows_3339654.html