A 15-year-old and a 17-year-old, both Orange County residents who had COVID-19, died this month, according to OC Health Care Agency officials.

The news was mentioned in the first episode of “Your Health Matters OC,” a new program the health agency is producing and streaming on its YouTube channel and Facebook page.

The father of the 17-year-old, who attended San Juan Hills High School, recently spoke with CBS LA about his daughter’s death from multisystem inflammatory syndrome. He urged young people to get vaccinated, something he said his daughter refused to do.

Less information was available about the case of the 15-year-old, whose family didn’t give county health officials permission to make details public.

The other three pediatric COVID-19 deaths were a teen girl in August 2020, and two children under 5, in September 2021 and January 2022.

Health experts say children are typically at a much lower risk than other age groups for serious complications or death from COVID-19, but the most recent wave of cases has hit youths harder than previous ones.

“During the surge of omicron we really saw more illness in kids and more severe disease in kids,” Dr. Matt Zahn, the OC Health Care Agency’s deputy health officer, said on “Your Health Matters OC.”

In earlier waves, teens with health issues such as obesity were most likely to have severe illness, Zahn said, but “this time we saw otherwise healthy young kids, under 3 years of age (without) underlying health conditions, others perfectly healthy, still would get sick and end up in the hospital.”

To date, 6,570 Orange County residents with COVID-19 have died, according to county health agency data.

Episodes of “Your Health Matters OC” will be release every other Tuesday and are intended to help inform the community about health-related issues, officials said.