“It was just so rapid,” Lino recalls. “Everything was just so sudden.”

With Alyssa’s health in jeopardy, the family rushed her back to urgent care where a physician discovered her oxygen levels were dangerously low. Alyssa was then taken to Kaweah Delta Medical Center, and it was there that Alyssa went into cardiac arrest as doctors tried to test her for meningitis.

Within hours, on the afternoon of Dec. 17, Alyssa died.

Days after her passing, just as the family prepared for her memorial, they discovered that officials attributed Alyssa death to cardiac arrest and septic shock after a strep blood infection entered her bloodstream. The doctor’s initial diagnosis of influenza was wrong.

“I was shocked, it was just mixed emotions. I thought finding out what it was would offer come closure of some kind,” Lino says. “Once we found out what it was, I was just shocked that something so simple took my baby.”

Alyssa Alcaraz (center), her sister (left), and mother (right)

Courtesy Jeremy Alcaraz

Typically, if caught early, a strep infection can be treated with antibiotics.

“I was angry, all they needed to do was some blood work and an antibiotic and she would have been fine,” Jeremy Alcaraz, Alyssa’s father, tells PEOPLE. “This wouldn’t have happened.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year, more than 1.5 million Americans get sepsis, leading to some 250,000 deaths. Sepsis occurs when chemicals used to fight an infection enters the bloodstream causing inflammation throughout the body. Symptoms include breathing difficulties, low blood pressure, mental confusion and a fast heart rate.

Courtesy Jeremy Alcaraz

Alyssa’s mother says that just days before she became ill, she was happy and healthy, having just sung in a Christmas concert with her school’s choir.

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