3 Orange County Children Died Of Omicron In Past 2 Months
SANTA ANA (CBSLA) — California is poised to lift its mask mandate for schools, but public health officials in Orange County say they "strongly recommend" people keep their faces covered after three children died in the Omicron surge since the beginning of the new year.
In just the past two months, three children have died of COVID-19 in Orange County – including a healthy teenage girl whose father says she was not vaccinated, and a child under the age of 5 who was not eligible for vaccination. The third death was also a teenager, public health officials said in a recent episode of "Your Health Matters OC."
The Omicron surge was the most devastating for children across the country in the past two years of the pandemic, according to Orange County deputy health officer Dr. Matthew Zahn.
In this most recent surge, "we saw more illness in kids and more severe disease in kids," Zahn said. Orange County Children's Hospital, and other children's hospitals across the country, saw the Omicron variant more severely impact children without underlying health conditions and who were otherwise perfectly healthy. In previous surges, young people with severe obesity were hit hardest, he said.
Case and test positivity rates have been dropping steadily in Orange County, but the region continues to see an uncomfortably high number of deaths from COVID-19. Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, who is also a deputy health officer for Orange County, pointed out that because more people have access to test kits at home, the county's lower test positivity rate may be an unreliable metric because those results are never reported to public health officials.
So while mask mandates are steadily being relaxed, health officials are reminding the public that there is still a considerable amount of COVID circulating in the community.
"The consistent masking efforts by our residents has contributed to the declines in cases," Dr. Clayton Chau, Orange County's health officer and director of the OC Health Care Agency, said in a statement. "To protect those at high risk, we are recommending that OC residents continue masking in public, indoor settings, especially those who are high risk or living with loved ones who have comorbidities, are immunocompromised or are prone to getting sick."