Two infants, a 1-month-old boy and a 5-month-old girl, who were among the 122 deaths from COVID-19 reported Wednesday, have become the youngest people to die from the disease in Taiwan to date, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said.
The 1-month-old boy, a Taiwanese national who was born prematurely with lung disease, developed a fever on May 24 after two of his family members came down with COVID-19, said Lo Yi-chun (???), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division.
The next morning, his parents found him unresponsive and noticed that his skin had turned blue and took him to a local hospital accompanied by police officers.
At the hospital, he tested positive for COVID-19 using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, and his death was classified as being caused by COVID-19 and respiratory failure, Lo said.
The 5-month-old girl is an Indonesian national who was mainly being taken care of by a friend of her mother, Lo said.
The girl had a fever on May 14, and the person taking care of her gave her a COVID-19 rapid test, which came back positive. She was given fever medication, but was found unresponsive the next morning. Her death was attributed to COVID-19 and heart and lung failure, Lo said.
Her case has been referred to social welfare authorities, Lo said.
When asked why the conditions of the two infants rapidly deteriorated, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung (???) said that there could be other factors at play, and that further investigation was required.
Severe infections involving children
Also on Wednesday, Lo said that a 9-year-old boy previously reported as having developed symptoms of encephalitis was newly classified as a severe COVID-19 case.
The boy developed a fever of nearly 40 degrees Celsius on May 29, and a COVID-19 rapid test he took came back positive. He later began having convulsions and started to lose consciousness, and his parents took him to the emergency room of a local hospital.
He is currently being treated at the hospital and is in stable condition, Lo said.
The cases reported Wednesday bring the number of children 12 years old and younger who have developed severe COVID-19 infections to 29, of whom 12 have died.
Encephalitis was a factor in the death of five of these children, while two had gotten pneumonia and one had septic shock. Another of the children died because of complications from a brain tumor, and three others were found unresponsive at home.
To date, Taiwan has recorded 2,377 deaths linked to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
Of the 2,005,338 domestic cases recorded in Taiwan this year, 1,810 have been classified as severe infections and 3,905 as moderate, accounting for 0.09 percent and 0.19 percent of the total, respectively, according to CECC data as of May 31.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel