(Picture: PA)
A 15-year-old girl died after deteriorating ‘astonishingly quickly’ from a rare heart problem brought on by Covid, an inquest has heard.
Jorja Halliday, from Portsmouth, was described as an otherwise ‘healthy’ teenager before catching the virus.
She only suffered aches and a sore throat at first and was prescribed antibiotics, but after four days went back to her GP after her heart began beating fast and she struggled to keep food down.
The doctor found her heart was racing at 144 beats per minute and told her mum Tracey to rush her to hospital.
She was placed in a coma so she could be transferred to another facility for specialist care but died about five hours later, on the same day she was due to get her jab.
A coroner was told the infection had led to ‘severe’ myocarditis – an inflammation of the heart muscle which is ‘extremely rare’ in young people.
The team of doctors who tried to save her were said to have been ‘horrified’ as it became apparent they ‘could not stop’ her going into cardiac arrest.
Dr Nicholas Tarmey told the inquest: ‘She looked frightened, not just of the situation, she also had a sense something was seriously wrong with her body.
‘Her body was struggling to cope and she was deteriorating very quickly and she looked confused and agitated.’
‘Everything we were trying would buy us only a few minutes. We could not reverse the situation, we could not stop the decline of her heart.
‘We were making all these interventions to help Jorja but she kept getting worse.We all felt horrified by what happened to Jorja.’
Consultant paediatric pathologist Samantha Holden, giving a cause of death of acute myocarditis associated with Covid-19 infection.
Both Dr Tarmey and Dr Holden said Jorja was the ‘only child’ they have treated with Covid-induced myocarditis.
Asked by Jorja’s mum whether getting her Covid jab earlier would have saved her life, Dr Tarmey said: ‘I really don’t know…
‘We know that the jab reduces the risk of severe complications, so I suppose having a jab might reduce the risk of these complications, but I am extrapolating that from the benefits we know.’
After the inquest, Tracey added: ‘It’s always going to be a question in my mind. If she had it sooner, would the outcome be different?
‘It’s a question nobody can answer, there is a lot of what ifs.’
She said she hopes her daughter’s case ‘gets the message out there that Covid can do this to young people’.
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