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16-year-old cancer patient succumbs to COVID-19
– Seven children now hospitalised
Kaieteur News – Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, yesterday announced that a 16-year-old child who was a patient in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Liliendaal Infectious Disease Hospital has succumbed to the virus.
The Minister, who made the announcement during his daily COVID-19 update, said the child had a form of cancer and had died within the last 24 hours.
This child is now the country’s third youngest COVID-19 fatality since the pandemic reached these shores in March last year. An 11-year-old who was diagnosed with cancer was the first young person to succumb, while a 17-year-old boy was the second.
It was revealed during the interview that there are presently seven children who are admitted to the hospital, they are being closely monitored by health authorities. According to Dr. Anthony, these children are not in the COVID-19 ICU but are housed in the regular wards.
Earlier in the month, the Minister had highlighted that it was becoming a worrying trend since more children are being infected with a more severe form of the disease.
In this regard, he is encouraging parents to take extra precautions with children since a different form of the disease is circulating than that of the initial strain.
“We need to take precautions with our children, which is very important. Initially, the type of variants that were circulating … where children, if they got infected would have generally got a mild form of the disease; that pattern is changing and we are seeing that children now are being affected in a more adverse way,” the Minister explained.
Meanwhile, the Health Ministry yesterday in its release reported that a 73-year-old woman from Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) who tested positive for COVID-19 died on Thursday. As a result of this, the country’s COVID-19 death toll has moved to 507.
Further, the Ministry in its daily COVID-19 dashboard recorded 77 new infections, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 21,351.
Presently, there are eight patients in the COVID-19 ICU, 103 persons in institutional isolation, 1,068 in home isolation and five are in institutional quarantine.
To date, a total of 19,665 persons have recovered from the virus.
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