A 4-year-old girl died with COVID-19 hours after showing symptoms in an extremely rare case in Texas

• A 4-year-old girl in Texas died with COVID-19 on Tuesday just hours after showing a fever.
• The girl’s mother, who was unvaccinated, said she now wishes she hadn’t been against the vaccine.
• COVID-19-related deaths in children are very rare, but the Delta variant has had a greater impact on kids.
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A young girl in Bacliff, Texas, died from COVID-19 this week in an extremely rare case, according to the Galveston County Health District.

Kali Cook, who was four years old, died Tuesday just hours after she first began showing symptoms, Karra Harwood, the girl’s mother, told the local outlet The Daily News. Harwood said she tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday and tried to isolate herself from her kids.

But around 2 a.m. she noticed Kali had a fever and gave her medicine to treat it. By 7 a.m., Kali had died in her sleep.

Coronavirus vaccines are not approved for use in children under 12, so Kali was unvaccinated. However, her mother, who said she had also contracted COVID-19, told The Daily News she regretted not getting vaccinated herself.

“I was one of the people that was anti, I was against it,” she said. “Now, I wish I never was.”

Harwood told the outlet her daughter Kali was “so funny and sassy” and would “rather play with worms and frogs than wear bows.”

The Galveston County Health District said Kali’s death was the youngest documented COVID-19 death in the district. It also said it did not believe she contracted COVID-19 at school.

More children are testing positive for COVID-19 as the more transmissible Delta variant causes cases to surge throughout the US. However, severe illness and death in young children is still rare.

According to a September 2 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, children made up 0.00%-0.27% of all COVID-19 deaths in the states that reported figures, while 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.

But there has been the occasional report of a child death, including a five-year-old boy who died in Georgia in July and a child under 5 who died this week in Orange County, California.