A three-week-old baby in Long Island, New York has reportedly tested positive for coronavirus, making the infant the youngest person in the United States to contract the disease.
Fox News reported that the newborn was treated at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola for several days, but is now home recuperating.
The report comes amid fears from health experts that younger people are more susceptible to COVID-19 than they originally thought.
As the coronavirus continues to plague the country, health officials are constantly reminding everyone, especially young people who don’t seem to be taking the virus seriously, to keep practicing social distancing even if they or the people around them aren’t showing any symptoms.
A recent analysis from the CDC showed that United States 38% of coronavirus cases between February 12th and March 16th were from people who were younger than 55.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday (Mar. 22) that more than half of coronavirus cases there have been among young people between the ages of 18 and 49.
Officials in California Tuesday (Mar. 24) reported the first death in the U.S. of a coronavirus patient younger than 18, and the family of a 12-year-old girl in Georgia said Sunday that she was fighting for her life in an Atlanta hospital after contracting the virus.
As of Thursday, New York has more than 30,000 of the country’s more than 65,000 cases (NYC alone has nearly 22,000 of those 30K cases), and 285 residents across the state have died from the virus as officials call for tens of thousands more ventilators, hospital beds and intensive care beds to meet hospitals’ needs.
