The Beverly Hills community is mourning the loss of plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni, who died on Friday after contracting COVID-19 from a patient. He was 50.
According to reports, Simoni was wearing a mask when he performed a lip injection procedure on a female patient last month. Her temperature was taken prior to the appointment. However, days later, she contacted Simoni's office to let them know she had tested positive.
"Yes, he was wearing a mask at all times," family friend Katy Amiri-Younesi told CBS News of Simoni. "He was a physician. And he took all the protocols."
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Simoni, who has appeared on The Doctors show, went into quarantine but was soon taken to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and put on a ventilator as his symptoms worsened.
Once at the hospital, he quickly deteriorated and was placed in a medically induced coma before dying of a brain hemorrhage, TMZ reported.
"The shock is that he was so perfectly healthy," Amiri-Younesi told CBS. "He's a doctor, I called him when I had COVID. He was instructing me what to do."
Per Simoni's official website, he was "one of Hollywood's top 5 plastic surgeons" and a "double board certified facial plastics expert who has perfected advanced rhinoplasty techniques." He earned his undergraduate degree at Yeshiva University and his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
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At the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put a stop to elective surgeries to help contain the spread. However, in May, they issued new guidelines for clinics and hospitals that were looking to begin performing non-coronavirus healthcare again, such as elective procedures, per Infection Control Today.
Beverly Hills is in Los Angeles County, which became the first county in the U.S. to surpass 1 million coronavirus cases since the onset of the pandemic last year on Saturday.
As of Monday morning, the county has confirmed 1,014,662 cases, with 11,366 new cases reported on Sunday, per L.A. County's Public Health Department. At least 7,498 people are currently hospitalized with the virus and 13,848 have died.
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