A 10-year-old Latino boy from East County who died on January 23 is now the region’s youngest COVID-19-related death, according to the latest San Diego County coronavirus tracking report released Friday.
It was a gloomy record day. In addition to the youngest, a 106-year-old man, also from East County, became the oldest local COVID-related death of 2,777 announced to date.
Previously, the youngest to suffer such harsh consequences after a novel coronavirus infection was a 19-year-old man who died on January 3. The oldest COVID-19 victim above was a 104-year-old woman from the “north-central” area of the county who died Jan. 1, according to county records.
Both the oldest and the youngest had other health problems in addition to testing positive for the virus. Thirty-seven of the 39 deaths announced in Friday’s report had other health problems.
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It was not immediately clear why the death of the 10-year-old boy took almost two weeks to be communicated to the public. Typically, the county health department has said in the past that notification delays may be due to the time it takes to process death certificates or a delay in notification of the loss by a hospital to the public health.
As always, the county has not provided information on the specific circumstances – including what other illnesses were present – of the losses. Such details are not related to individual deaths for fear that doing so may facilitate identification of the deceased.
In general, death has been very rare among those under 18 years of age. According to provisional death counts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 67 children ages 5 to 14 have died from a confirmed coronavirus infection among the more than 421,000 related deaths. with COVID across the country. This figure is known to be incomplete due to reporting delays, sometimes lasting weeks.
As the community continues to record deaths of those hospitalized during the December-January surge of patients, the local pandemic remains well below previous daily totals of new cases, which topped 4,000 on several occasions after the holidays.
Friday’s report, however, showed a slight rebound. After two days below 1,000, the total daily cases were 1,453 on Thursday, following Wednesday’s 1598 count.
Total COVID-related hospitalizations continued to decline, reaching 1,183, with 353 in intensive care beds.
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