Fully Vaccinated Texas Teacher With Booster Shot Dies Of COVID-19

A fully vaccinated teacher in Texas who also received a booster shot has died of COVID-19 complications last week, officials from the Richardson Independent School District have announced.

District officials said Monday that Eroletta Piascyk was admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 and was expected to recover before she passed away. Piascyk had been with Richardson ISD for at least two decades and was teaching at the Christa McAuliffe Learning Center at the time of her death.

"She had been in the hospital but was expected to do better and so it was just a sudden shock we lost her when we did," Dr. Jeannie Stone, RISD Superintendent, said in a statement cited by Fox 4 News.

As of Sept. 27, 5,226 breakthrough COVID-19 deaths were reported in the United States. Of the total number of deaths, 44% occurred in females, 86% in people aged 65 and older, and 17% in people who did not show symptoms or whose deaths were not related to COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The health agency’s data also showed that more than 16,000 fully vaccinated Americans have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. At least 11,653 were patients aged 65 and older, 8,095 were females, and 3,114 were patients with asymptomatic COVID-19 or who were hospitalized for reasons other than COVID-19 and tested positive when screened upon admission.

Infection rates across the U.S. have been declining since mid-September. The country has been reporting an average of 105,054 new COVID-19 infections each day over the past week. The figures were 12,000 less than the average daily cases reported the week before, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Despite the decline in case numbers, the infection rate among children under 18 remains exceptionally high. Between Sept. 23 and Sept. 30, officials reported 173,469 COVID-19 infections in children, which represented 26.7% of the weekly reported cases.

Throughout September, U.S. health officials reported nearly 850,000 novel coronavirus infections among children, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The United States has so far recorded 43,947,979 COVID-19 cases and 705,190 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.