Is coronavirus hitting young Americans harder than we thought?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/01/coronavirus-young-americans-covid-19

Danielle Renwick
Wed 1 Apr 2020 12.48 EDT
Last modified on Wed 1 Apr 2020 13.22 EDT

Early reports out of China showed that elderly people and the chronically ill were most vulnerable to Covid-19. Yet an alarming number of young people in the United States have been hospitalized with severe infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40% of American Covid-19 patients who were hospitalized were under 55 – and 20% were between ages 20 and 44. And in rare cases, even children have died after falling ill with Covid-19. Three experts interpret the data.

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Dr Timothy Brewer: The data have actually been pretty consistent across lots of different countries. Initially, people were very focused on mortality rates, and death rates in young adults are low pretty much everywhere you look. And I think people interpreted that to mean that young adults were not getting infected, and were not getting severely ill. As more data came out about hospitalizations and infection rates, we learned that was not the case.

A recent study out of Shenzhen, China, showed that young people are just as likely to get infected as older individuals. Now that we’re seeing more data on hospitalization rates, we’re seeing that yes, young adults are experiencing severe illnesses. The big difference between them and older adults is [young adults’] mortality rates tend to be lower.

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Brewer: It takes people a lot longer to recover from this than we thought. We’ll have to see long term, but one of the things we learned from tuberculosis – which is a totally different pathogen – is that even if you cure the tuberculosis, a lot of people are left with long-term lung damage. And that’s very much a concern with Covid-19, and it’s something we’ll learn about going forward.

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