A three-year-old boy has become the youngest person in New South Wales to die after contracting COVID-19.
Sebastian Moroney tested positive on December 23 and had to isolate with a parent for 10 days to protect his two-week-old sister, Liora.
Sebastian spent his third birthday in isolation before dying peacefully in his home in Campbelltown in west Sydney.
The three-year-old was born with a rare genetic disease called Niemann-Pick, which affects the body's ability to metabolize fat.
Moroney was born with the Type A version of the disease, which typically infects people when they are infants. Carriers do not often live beyond a few years.
His official cause of death was both Niemann-Pick and COVID-19 according to his mother, and NSW Health did not count him among the nine people who died from the virus in the figures announced on Saturday.
The boy's mother Jordanna said he had "defied predictions" about how long he would live when he was born.
"He was expected to live for eight months. He fought and we gave him the best care we could," she said, according to ABC.
"He was terminal… but he defied predictions; he was alive and interacting with the people around him. Until he got COVID.
"We're so devastated. He was such a sweet little boy, and he fought so hard for so long. We were never ready to let him go."
It has been a "rollercoaster of bizarre feelings" for Jordanna over the past month.
"Liora was born on December 10, my dad passed away two days before and it's just been a rollercoaster of bizarre feelings," Jordanna told NCA NewsWire.
"He lived to see his little sister, he lived to Christmas, he made it to his birthday. He had been getting weaker by inches for a long time because of his degenerative condition, but COVID just ripped through him and it changed everything.
"In the end it was very peaceful, he passed in his sleep. We had been scared for a really long time about how he would go and in the end he just slipped away."
Jordanna asked people to donate to a fundraising page set up by the Mums 4 Refugees, with proceeds going to the refugee clinic at the Children's Hospital at Westmead and the Paediatric Ambulatory Care (PAC) unit at Campbelltown Hospital. The fundraiser hit its AU$10,000 target in just one day.
New South Wales has seen case numbers spike over the last month. On Tuesday it was announced there were 25,870 new cases and 11 deaths.
There are 2186 people in hospital with the virus and 170 in ICU.
