The Beverly Hills community mourns the loss of plastic surgeon, dr. Payman Simoni, who died Friday after contracting COVID-19 from a patient. He was 50.
According to reports, Simoni was wearing a mask when he did a lip injection procedure on a female patient last month. Her temperature was taken before the appointment. But days later, she contacted Simoni’s office to let them know she had tested positive.
“Yes, he wore a mask at all times,” family friend Katy Amiri-Younesi told CBS News of Simoni. “He was a doctor. And he took all the protocols. ‘
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Simoni, who appeared on The doctors show, goes into quarantine, but was soon taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and put on a ventilator as his symptoms worsened.
In hospital, he rapidly deteriorated and was placed in a medically induced coma before dying of a brain hemorrhage, TMZ reports.
“The shock is that he was so healthy,” Amiri-Younesi told CBS. “He’s a doctor. I called him when I got COVID. He instructed me to do so. ‘
Per Simoni’s official website, he was “one of the top 5 plastic surgeons in Hollywood” and “a double-quarter-certified facial plastic surgeon who perfected advanced rhinoplastic 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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put an end to elective surgery to limit its spread. In May, however, they issued new guidelines for clinics and hospitals that are trying to resume healthcare without coronavirus, such as elective procedures, according to Infection control today.
Beverly Hills is in Los Angeles County, which since the onset of the pandemic last Saturday became the first province in the U.S. to surpass 1 million cases of coronavirus.
As of Monday morning, the province had confirmed 1,014,662 cases, with 11,366 new cases reported Sunday, according to the LA County Department of Public Health. At least 7,498 people are currently hospitalized with the virus and 13,848 have died.
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