Statistics from last week highlighted that 40% of Americans hospitalised for Coronavirus were between the ages of 20-54.
12% of intensive care admissions were among those ages 20 to 44, while 36% were for those 45 to 64.
This has lead Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to say that U.S Health Officials will be ‘looking very closely’ as to why this has occurred.
Similar information has been reported from Italy, the worst hot European country to date, leading the World Health Organisation (WHO) to comment young people are “not invincible”.
Speaking on the situation in Italy Dr Antonio Pesenti, the head of Lombardy’s intensive crisis care unit said that many younger people were being admitted with serious cases of COVID-19.
“50% of our patients in the intensive care unit, which are the most severe patients, are over 65 years old. But that means that the other 50% of our patients are younger than 65. We have patients who are 20 years old or 30 years old, quite a few, and those are severe like the old ones.”
(Dr Antonio Pesenti)
In America, around 80% of the people who have passed from COVID-19 have been 65 or over with the majority being over 85.
However, the severity in which young people have been affected by the virus has been unexpected in the U.S and Europe when looking at the date from China.
“It looks like there is a big difference between that demography from China and what we’re seeing in Europe.
Now we have to look at the young people who are getting seriously ill from the European cohort and make sure that it isn’t just driven by the fact that they have underlying conditions because we know that underlying conditions — all bets are off no matter how young you are if you have an underlying, serious medical condition. You’re going to potentially get into trouble,”
“But if they don’t have underlying conditions, that will be something we will have to really examine as to why we’re seeing it here but we didn’t see it in China. So we’re going to look at that very closely.”
(Dr. Anthony Fauci)
