Remembering Front-Line Workers Lost To COVID-19

It has been five months since the novel coronavirus started infecting Americans. Since then, the U.S. has lost more than 119,000 people to the sickness it causes — COVID-19.

So many have been touched by the deaths of family and friends. Here we remember just a few of those who continued working during the pandemic because their jobs called for it and who, ultimately, lost their lives.

Yves-Emmanuel Segui, 60

Pharmacist in Yonkers, N.Y.

"I think that he just thought: 'Work as usual. There are a lot of sick people and that's even more of a reason for me to work,' " his daughter Morit Segui, a resident physician and OB-GYN in the Bronx, says of her father.

Yves-Emmanuel Segui had been a pharmacist in Ivory Coast for more than 10 years when political unrest forced the family to leave in 2004. The family immigrated to the U.S. for what he said were "better opportunities."

But Segui had a hard time getting his pharmacy license in the United States. There was a language barrier — he spoke French — and the skills for pharmacists in Ivory Coast are much different, more like being a nurse.

Morit says her father took the pharmacy licensing test eight times. He never gave up — and finally passed.

Segui got a job at a community pharmacy on the border of Yonkers and the Bronx about two years ago, but he continued to make ends meet as a parking garage attendant in Newark, N.J. He died on April 6 of COVID-19.

"I have so many good memories of growing up in the Ivory Coast with my dad. Going to get ice cream was one of the happiest things. Taking trips through the country with him. I love driving because of that — he taught me how to drive," Morit says.

And she fondly recalls him staying up late with her at night after they moved to the U.S., helping her translate her homework (the main language in Ivory Coast is French)so she could get through it. "When I