Galveston, Texas — Local media outlets report that a Texas 4-year-old died from COVID-19 in her sleep hours after getting a fever in the night.
Kali Cook, a preschooler from Galveston, was the first child to die from COVID-19 who is under 10 years old in the county, Galveston County health officials said in a statement.
“We are all so broken and lost and just trying to figure out how we are going to get throught this life without her light,” the girl’s mother Karra Harwood wrote on a GoFundMe.
Thousands of children are hospitalized across the country with COVID-19, but Kali Cook never made it there.
Her mom tested positive with the virus the day Kali Cook died, local news outlets reported.
“Our family has COVID and is out of work due to it, so we are overly stressed and hurting,” she wrote on a GoFundMe post.
Harwood told the Galeveston County Daily News that her daughter did not have any underlying health conditions.
“I was one of the people that was anti, I was against it,” she told the Galveston County Daily News. “Now, I wish I never was.”
Kali Cook’s 5-month-old brother was hospitalized after she died, KPRC News reported.
Health officials said in a statement it was unlikely the girl contracted the virus from her preschool.
Children represent 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 outlets that Kali Cook’s death was coronavirus-related, local health officials backtracked and told KPRC News they would “not count Kali’s death as a COVID-19 death until the autopsy was completed.” She did test positive for the virus, however.
Read more about this story from the Houston Chronicle, the Galveston County Daily News and KPRC news.