Shortly after Alonso Moreira’s twelfth birthday earlier this month, they both began struggling to breathe. They had been infected with the coronavirus.
The paramedics took them to Stroger Hospital, where they were placed at opposite ends of the hospital. Miller said he asked doctors in vain to take Alonso to a hospital more appropriate for his age and condition.
Two days later, a doctor came to his room and told him that Alonso had died.
“It’s too hard and I miss my son,” Miller said through tears.
Since the pandemic began last year, nine children aged 15 and under have died from COVID-19 in Cook County. Most had underlying medical conditions that put them at risk of dying from coronavirus. In early August, a 9-year-old boy died of cerebral palsy. In June, a 7-year-old girl died of leukemia.
Their deaths point to the particular dangers posed by COVID for medically vulnerable children.
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“Children with any type of underlying disease are at higher risk for more severe COVID disease if they become infected,” said Dr. Tina Tan, a pediatrician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital. “And many of these children will be hospitalized. And unfortunately some will die.”
The most common underlying diseases among children who have died of COVID are obesity, diabetes, and asthma. And children with Down syndrome have been shown to be ten times more likely to die from the virus.
So he said that children from minority communities are more likely to get the virus and therefore die from it.
“These children come from multi-generational households with less easy access to health care, probably have an underlying condition such as obesity or asthma, and usually come from lower socioeconomic areas where there is a disparity in access. to health, ”he said.
There is no evidence that children are getting sicker from the more contagious delta variant of COVID-19, Tan said. But there are more infected children because the variant is more easily transmitted and many children remain unvaccinated, even though the vaccine was approved in May for children up to 12 years old.
Childhood cases of coronavirus have increased sharply since early summer, from about 38,000 cases a week in July to 180,000 a week in August, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Miller lives in Lawndale, where the vaccination rate is lower than in many parts of Chicago, according to city data.
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Miller said neither she nor her son had been vaccinated, although he planned to end the shooting for her and her son.
Since he was discharged from the hospital, Miller said he has been struggling financially even more than he had been. He said he works weird jobs, but “sometimes they pay me and sometimes they don’t,” he said.
Miller said his state ID card had expired and he hadn’t gotten one, so he couldn’t apply for Medicaid. She said she got rid of her belongings after she and her son got sick, for fear she might become infected again, even though there is no medical basis for it.
“We have nothing,” he said, waving an arm around his basement apartment, barren except for a chair and a small pile of hospital paperwork.
Miller said he traveled through the city to present documents to obtain a new identification in hopes that he could pay for his son’s funeral. For now, his body remains in the funeral home. He said he has contacted charities but received no news.
“I pray to God to be strong,” Miller said. “We pray that God will take care of this.”
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire – Copyright Chicago Sun-Times 2021.)
The video from the previous player is from a previous report.