The Beverly Hills community is mourning the loss of plastic surgeon Dr. Payman Simoni, who died on Friday after contracting a patient’s COVID-19. He was 50 years old.
According to reports, Simoni was wearing a mask when he underwent a lip injection procedure on a patient last month. Her temperature was measured before the appointment. However, days later, she contacted Simoni’s office to inform them that her test was positive.
“Yes, he wore a mask all the time,” family friend Katy Amiri-Younesi told Simoni’s CBS News. “He was a doctor. And he took all the protocols.”
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Simoni, who appeared in The doctors show, was quarantined, but was soon taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and placed on a ventilator when his symptoms worsened.
Once in the hospital, he quickly deteriorated and was put into an induced coma before he died of cerebral hemorrhage, TMZ reported.
“The shock is that he was perfectly healthy,” Amiri-Younesi told CBS. “He’s a doctor, I called him when he had COVID. He was instructing me on what to do.”
On Simoni’s official website, he was “one of the top 5 plastic surgeons in Hollywood” and a “double-board certified facial plastic specialist who perfected advanced rhinoplasty techniques”. He earned his undergraduate degree from Yeshiva University and his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
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At the start of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) halted elective surgery to help stem the spread. However, in May, they issued new guidelines for clinics and hospitals looking to start providing medical care unrelated to the coronavirus again, as elective procedures, according to Infection control today.
Beverly Hills is in Los Angeles County, which has become the first U.S. county to exceed 1 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began last year on Saturday.
As of Monday morning, the county confirmed 1,014,662 cases, with 11,366 new cases registered on Sunday, according to the LA County Department of Public Health. At least 7,498 people are currently hospitalized with the virus and 13,848 died.
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