The parents of an eight-year-old girl have accused the authorities of lying about children getting seriously ill from COVID-19 after their young daughter died of complications from the virus.

Little Julieta, from the city of Lanus in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires, was treated at Hospital Interzonal De Agudos Evita for nine days.

She reportedly died as a result of a multisystem inflammatory syndrome that affected her vital organs, including her heart, lungs, and liver, according to the news site Clarin.

The girl’s mother Cintya was the first to contract COVID-19 before passing it onto the rest of her family.

Her husband Daniel spent 12 days with an intense fever while Julieta and her 16-year-old sister were initially asymptomatic.

However, after several days, a rash appeared on Julieta’s skin that her GP treated it with cream and did not consider it as a symptom of the novel coronavirus, according to reports.

Three weeks later, Julieta’s problems worsened with gastrointestinal problems and fever close to 40 degrees Celsius.

She was taken to A&E and later sent home with a prescription for antibiotics to treat an infection detected in her lungs in an X-ray.

However, despite the course of antibiotics, the girl’s condition worsened and she was taken back to hospital.

Julieta underwent a series of tests and her mother remembered the rash the girl originally had and told doctors about it.

One doctor recognised the symptom as an early manifestation of COVID-19 and launched protocols established for virus patients.

However, the eight-year-old girl’s health deteriorated and she then developed pneumonia and required intubation, according to the media source Telecinco.

At around 11am on 9th July, the parents received a call that Julieta was suffering from irreversible brain arrest and that they were waiting for her heart to stop to disconnect the life-support machine and certify her death.

The parents said: “They tell us that children don’t get sick (with COVID-19) and it was a lie. If we had known about the rash before, this would have all been very different.”

The parents also announced that they support the vaccination of all children against the novel coronavirus and criticised their GP for allegedly diagnosing their daughter’s rash incorrectly, adding: “The GP should have told us, even more so knowing we all had COVID-19 at the time.”