According to Jenkins, the woman had trouble breathing and was given oxygen before her death, NBC 5 reported. A Sunday news release also revealed that the woman had underlying health conditions.
Jenkins also told TV station WFAA that even though the woman died on July 25, the county was not told it was a COVID-19 related death until a few days ago. It is unclear whether the woman was aware that she had COVID-19 at the time of her death, and officials have not identified which airline the woman was flying with.
"[This is a] reminder that there is no age restriction in COVID," Jenkins reiterated to the outlet.
"I would strongly encourage people to not think they’re invincible from COVID because they don’t think they’re in a high-risk category," Jenkins also told BuzzFeed News.
According to a New York Times database, there have been at least 869,725 COVID-19 cases and 17,451 related deaths in Texas since the start of the pandemic.
In the last week, 19 US states have seen record-high case numbers, which may be an indication of another wave of infections.
“We’ve been talking about the fall surge for a long time now. I think that is the beginning of that reality,” Scott Gottlieb, US President Donald Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, told CNBC on Friday, The Hill reported.
Other experts have said the US is on track to surpass the daily high in new cases.
“We’re actually almost already back at the peak that we saw nationally in the summer,” Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, recently told The Hill.
“We're almost back at that same level and I don't believe that we're anywhere close to that rise abating. … We're seeing [cases] go up, and in Europe and in many of those places, cases really did get down fairly low numbers first, and now they're skyrocketing again in many places. We're seeing it in the US, and we're seeing [it] in other places as well, and so we're pretty much there, and I think we have a long winter ahead.”