A total of 15 children have died as a result of the novel coronavirus since the pandemic began in March 2020. Most of those who passed away had a range of comorbidities, according to Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony.
“We continue to monitor and try to decipher what is causing the deaths. For some of those children that would have been hospitalised, we know for sure some of the comorbidities that they have had and the challenges, because some of them, the prognosis was poor with their underlying diseases and then they got Covid, so that complicated the problem,” Dr. Anthony said on Monday.
Over the last few days, four children were reported to have died of Covid. Dr Anthony said the Ministry is currently investigating those deaths.
“In the last couple of days, we would have seen the four deaths of children and this is something that we’ll do some further investigation on because of the four, three of these children they were dead before arrival at the hospital, so they didn’t die in the hospital,” he explained.
‘When the mother was interviewed in some cases, we would have heard that the child was irritable the night before, had some fever and by the next morning had difficulty breathing and on arrival at the hospital when they did antigen test, they found that the child was positive, so they’re cases like this, so that’s why we have to investigate them,” he added.
The Health Minister further explained that “within the Ministry, we have a small committee of doctors who are going to get those charts and review them more thoroughly and do some interviews with the family of these children, so hopefully that will give us a better understanding of what is happening.”
Moreover, Minister Anthony explained that the high number of Covid deaths being reported in one day does not necessarily mean those persons died at the same time.
“Sometimes when the Ministry is reporting deaths, not all the deaths would’ve occurred within that 24 hour, so sometimes when they bunched the deaths up is because would have had a death that occurred couple of days earlier, and we didn’t get the information on time so sometimes, there’s that bunching.”
