A baby with COVID-19 had to be airlifted to a hospital 150 miles away because of a shortage of paediatric beds in Houston
- A baby with COVID-19 had to be airlifted to a hospital 150 miles from Houston due to a bed shortage.
- Ava Amira Rivera started having seizures after contracting COVID-19 and needed to be intubated.
- She has since made a full recovery, her doctors said.
An 11-month-old girl with COVID-19 had to be airlifted to a hospital 150 miles away from her hometown in Houston, Texas, due to a lack of beds in pediatric hospitals in the area.
Ava Amira Rivera started having seizures after contracting the coronavirus last week and needed to be intubated. However, all of the other pediatric hospitals had no more beds available.
A video, released by Harris Health, shows the baby girl being airlifted via helicopter to Baylor Scott & White McLane Children's Medical Center in Temple, where she has since made a full recovery.
"With the Delta variant, we certainly are seeing just more infectivity across the population that includes kids, that includes infants as well," Dr. Dominic Lucia, a pediatric emergency physician who works at the hospital, told CNN.
Harris Health, which is part of the Texas Medical Center, admitted 336 coronavirus patients on Thursday - the highest daily number of admissions since February, according to its website.
Texas has been grappling with an explosion of recent COVID-19 cases largely driven by the Delta variant.
More than 3.2 million people have contracted the virus in the state since the start of the pandemic and more than 53,000 have died from it, according to a tracker by Johns Hopkins University.