ST. GEORGE — Tiffanie Porter thought her 3-year-old had a natural immunity from COVID-19. 

The 41-year-old Washington City resident and her husband, both vaccinated, each had breakthrough cases in August. Then her 16-year-old contracted it. None ever had to be hospitalized, though Porter said it was a miserable two weeks at home for all of them. Yet her 3-year-old daughter never caught it. 

“We thought, ‘OK, so she probably has built up an immunity to it,’” Porter said.

Then came Thanksgiving. 

In a big family gathering, one aunt showed up asymptomatic with COVID-19.

A few days later, Porter’s daughter started exhibiting symptoms of a cold, some coughing and irritation – always stressful for a parent of a toddler but not enough to give too much worry.

As the day went along, the child complained that her body – and her head in particular – really hurt. 

Twenty-four hours later, Porter took her daughter’s temperature: 104 degrees.  

That began 14 days of constant pain, fever and lethargy. The Porters’ 3-year-old had COVID-19, and she had it bad. 

Porter learned that contrary to most public knowledge, kids can get severe COVID too.

“People have been telling us, you know, since COVID started that, ‘Oh, the kids have been spared, and when they’re little, they’re sick for a couple of days and they’re better,’ but that’s not the case,” Porter said. “I’m holding the most precious thing in my entire life, and she’s in so much pain and I literally can do nothing about it.”

Porter said she didn’t think her daughter would ever get that sick.

“Not in a million years,” she said. “I didn’t think COVID would do this to her. I did everything I could to not have her do it.”

According to medical experts, while the delta variant was the first type of COVID-19 to start infecting children in bigger numbers, omicron has taken it to another level – especially for those under five who are still not approved to be vaccinated for COVID-19.

In the last month, among people in Utah under 65, the age group with the highest rate of needing to be hospitalized for COVID are those ages 5 and under, according to the Utah Department of Health. Before January, toddlers were the third most likely to be hospitalized behind those between the ages of  45-64 and those 24-44. 

Overall, those over 65 still have a higher COVID hospitalization rate. Nevertheless, Dr. Andrew Pavia, who heads epidemiology at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, said he has been seeing a lot more babies in the hospital with COVID.

“It’s affecting more young children, especially 0 to 4. The kids under 4 have no way of being vaccinated,” Pavia said. “The number of kids getting affected is so high. Don’t just let your kids infected because its a ‘mild disease’ or you heard on Facebook it’s just a cold.”

A Thanksgiving infection

Porter has a blended family. Her husband had seven children from a previous marriage. Like many families, members of that blended family have had ideological differences as to how to deal with the pandemic. 

For Thanksgiving every year, Porter’s stepchildren visit their grandmother. Porter said that while she and her husband got fully vaccinated, wore masks in public and practiced other measures like physical distancing, other extended family members were against vaccines and wearing face coverings. The stepchildren’s aunt had attended an anti-mask protest in Ogden a few days before Thanksgiving. 

Porter said that aunt then came to visit their house, where she spent time with the 3-year-old.

“The next day, she (the aunt) tested positive for COVID, and I immediately started panicking,” Porter said. “A couple of days later is when our daughter ended up having it and got sick.”

Porter first took her daughter to an InstaCare. Within the first 48 hours of symptoms, doctors will say there is a likelihood that the COVID test would come up empty, which the initial tests did for the child.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, a temperature of 102.5 or higher is cause to take a 3-year-old to the emergency room. That night, Porter’s 3-year-old hit 104. After a day at the InstaCare, it was right back out to the emergency room. This time, the doctor said test or not, it was not respiratory syncytial virus – more commonly known as RSV – or a flu or something she ate. The doctor was convinced it was COVID-19.

But without the respiratory issues, the most the doctor could do was direct the mother to take the child home and give her Tylenol and ibuprofen, which Porter said was the first time she’s ever had to give her daughter any medication. 

“They were comfortable and they actually talked about how having a fever was a good thing because it was killing the virus,” Porter said. “But as a parent, having a doctor tell you that a fever is a good thing when it’s at 104 is a very panicky thing.”

Pavia said emergency rooms throughout the state are becoming more pediatric in the last few months.

“The real flood is happening at the emergency departments with children flooding in with COVID as well as RSV and severe colds,” he said. “We didn’t see these last year because there was universal masking in schools.”

Pavia said especially with the omicron variant, from what he has been seeing at Primary Children’s – where many children from Southern Utah with severe COVID are transported – the suffering has been worse the younger the age. Early studies on omicron are showing if a child hasn’t learned to walk yet, they may be as likely to suffer severe symptoms as an unvaccinated person over 65. Other studies have shown a large number of pregnant women losing their babies if they get COVID-19 and are unvaccinated.

Pavia said that previous to omicron, kids age 1 or younger with COVID didn’t typically have symptoms.

“With omicron, they’re coming in with breathing difficulty – bronchiolitis with children,” he said. “This is miserable to children. It’s not great if it’s your child that gets it.”

There are only a few treatments for COVID for adults and even less for children. Paxlovid, which is currently in short supply, is only approved by the Food and Drug Administration for ages 12 and above. The same goes for monoclonal antibodies, which has had less effect on omicron, and remdesivir, as well as convalescent plasma according to the National Institutes of Health. 

It is rarer for children to experience severe symptoms than adults, but when they do, there is less that can be done about it, leaving a child too young to go to school suffering more than an adult would. 

And suffering is what Porter’s daughter ended up dealing with – for 14 days. 

A day or so after she went to the emergency room for a 104 fever, she was back in the ER again. This time her fever was 106, and the breathing issues that weren’t there before had appeared. After a chest X-ray, doctors could see that the disease was engulfing her lungs. 

The little girl in her princess dress was hooked up to several IVs and pumped with antibiotics. In the days before COVID, a child in the 3-year-old’s condition would result in a hospital stay, but that was not the case with Porter’s daughter, with St. George Regional going through capacity issues that started in August and continue to this day. 

“If this would have been any other time in her life, when COVID wasn’t in existence and she got this sick, they would have kept her in the hospital and monitor and made sure that she was able to keep her fever at a better place than where it was and kept her with the IV fluids to keep her hydrated,” Porter said. “But they’re at capacity. They’re beyond capacity.”

The 3-year-old, like many children, didn’t show up in the statistics as a local COVID-19 hospitalization, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t go through weeks of pain and suffering. This is also difficult for parents, Pavia said. 

“Every parent knows that having your child sick at home is not much fun. They are sick enough that they don’t have to go to the hospital but are miserable,” he said. “Especially those who can’t be vaccinated.”

For the next two weeks, Porter’s daughter was never well enough to spend much time out of bed. Like adults with COVID-19, her worst times were the overnight hours. She couldn’t wear pajamas because they would be soaked in her sweat. And that meant two weeks of sleepless nights for her parents. 

“There was no such thing as sleep when she had COVID,” Porter said.
“Nobody slept. My husband and I took turns having naps, if you can call them that. But every couple hours she was in pain, and you can only give your child so much ibuprofen and Tylenol.” 

Porter said her daughter had “maybe one or two days” where it seemed like the child was getting better.

“But it was very short-lived. Her last three days that she was sick, she was sick,” Porter said.

And then it was gone.

“She literally woke up one day and her fever had broken, and that was it.”

Even though her daughter was weak from the experience – she had gone from 30 pounds to 24 pounds – the first thing she wanted to do was go out.

The next day, the Porters went to Zion National Park.

“We went up to Zion and did the river walk, and she was the happiest clam she could possibly be,” Porter said.

Eye-rolls for wearing masks in the market

There are the expected emotions of a mother whose toddler became sick – sadness, shock, fear – but Porter said she experienced another emotion: anger. She said she felt like her family and the community around her had failed her daughter by not taking it seriously that kids needed to be protected from the virus. 

“We have family and friends that are very much in that circle of like, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ Even now,” she said. “It hurts my heart to have them think that it’s not a big deal, because we could have lost our baby and for what? Because somebody felt like it’s not a big deal, and it’s just a cold or because young people don’t get sick?” 

Porter said she believed it’s “not just about ourselves.”

“It’s about helping each other out. And that’s not a thought that should be so hard for us to understand. It should be something that we, as a community, should rise up to the occasion and realize that we’re here to help each other.”

Porter said she is disappointed when she walks into a local market and sees so few wearing masks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is currently a higher than 99% chance a person walking in a supermarket in most of Southern Utah will be exposed to COVID-19 if they do not wear any face covering. 

Even after their experience, Porter said that she and her daughter get eye rolls when they are seen wearing their mask in the market. 

“It’s kind of shocking. I look at them and I just … I wish that they could see that it’s not just about them. It’s protecting everyone,” Porter said. “I’m kind of disappointed, honestly, because I thought that Utah was a place where people cared about each other and they cared about their family and friends, and I’ve seen more people become super mean during this time. Stubbornness is taking over the logic of just trying to take care of each other.”

For Porter, there’s also the uncertainty of what two weeks in bed with COVID-19 will do for her daughter in the future. There’s the psychological aspect, where the 3-year-old now has a fear of any needle from all the IV poking and prodding. There’s also the uncertain long-term aftermath of the disease, including long COVID – something both Porter and her husband have been dealing with since their own COVID-19 infections in August.

“We both have super bad fatigue now. And so what is going to happen to (my daughter) after this? We don’t know,” Porter said. “We hope that she recovers perfectly and it doesn’t cause any problems, but the truth is we just don’t know.”

One thing is for certain for Porter’s 3-year-old: She can at least dance again. 

“She was so happy when I told her we were starting ballet today,” Porter said. “She just could not stop jumping around, and I got to watch her dance and it was so cute. She had missed it so badly.”

COVID-19 information resources

St. George News has made every effort to ensure the information in this story is accurate at the time it was written. However, as the situation and science surrounding the coronavirus continues to evolve, it’s possible that some data has changed.

Check the resources below for up-to-date information and resources.

• Testing Sites
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• World Health Organization
• Utah Department of Health
• Safe Southern Utah
• Información sobre coronavirus en español
• Intermountain Healthcare
• To Donate and Volunteer to Help
• Utah COVID-19 Long Haulers

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