COVID-19 pandemic: an infant has died of the disease.On Wednesday, the province updated its COVID-19 dashboard with two weeks-worth of data.
Technical difficulties prevented last week’s update.According to Alberta Health, a child under one year of age died in December 2022 and their death was reclassified as due to COVID within the last two weeks.It is not uncommon for deaths to be reclassified as due to or not due to the coronavirus, depending on medical experts’ opinions and other documentation.
Read more: Alberta changing COVID-19 testing, isolation in the spring In the past fortnight, 24 more Albertans had their deaths attributed to the coronavirus, bringing the pandemic death toll to 5,643.
The infant was one of those deaths and the first in the under-1 age cohort.“We will not be identifying the gender of the child, or the zone this happened in, due to privacy considerations,” the health ministry said in an emailed statement.The under-1 age cohort has had hospitalization and ICU admission rates that nearly match the 60- to 69-year-old age cohort, based on population rate.As of March 27, there were 465 COVID hospitalizations, 21 fewer than two weeks ago.