Galveston, Texas – Local media reports that a 4-year-old Texas girl died of COVID-19 during sleep hours after having a fever at night.
Kali Cook, a Galveston preschooler, was the first child to die from COVID-19 who is under the age of 10 in the county, Galveston County health officials said in a statement.
“We’re all broken and lost and just trying to figure out how we’ll get through this life without her light,” the girl’s mother, Karra Harwood, wrote in a GoFundMe.
Thousands of children are hospitalized across the country with COVID-19, but Kali Cook never got there.
Her mother tested positive for the virus the day Kali Cook died, local media reported.
“Our family has COVID and doesn’t have a job because of it, so we are overly stressed and bad,” he wrote in a GoFundMe post.
Harwood told the Galeveston County Daily News that her daughter had no underlying illness.
“I was one of the people who was anti, I was against it,” he told the Galveston County news newspaper. “Now, I wish I never was.”
Kali Cook’s 5-month-old brother was hospitalized after he died, KPRC News reported.
Health officials said in a statement that the girl was unlikely to get the virus from her preschool.
Children account for more than 15% of all coronavirus cases reported in the United States since the pandemic began, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
A day after confirming to local media that Kali Cook’s death was related to the coronavirus, local health officials backed down and told KPRC News that “they will not count Kali’s death as COVID-19 death. until the autopsy is completed “. However, he tested positive for the virus.
Read more about this story in the Houston Chronicle, the Galveston County Daily and the KPRC news.