I’m Treating Too Many Young People for the Coronavirus

[Yoshiro Kamamura + 274]

Americans in their 20s and 30s—no matter how healthy and invincible they feel—need to understand how dangerous this virus can be.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/young-people-are-not-immune-coronavirus/608794/

.....

Late in the night, another young patient came in with a high fever and no underlying health conditions. They’d had a dry cough for the past four days. They’d come to the hospital after finding they were unable to walk a few feet without getting severely short of breath. On their chest X-ray, I saw lungs that were almost completely whited out, indicating a significant amount of inflammation. It was clear how uncomfortable they were, and how desperately they were trying to catch their breath. They were in a different category from the previous patients I’d seen that night. They needed to be admitted. They needed testing. They needed close monitoring.

I called the Intensive Care Unit team, and they admitted the young patient to the hospital. I finished my shift not long after, walked home, and got in bed, feeling unsteady. When I woke up a few hours later, I logged into our electronic medical record system and learned that in the time I’d been asleep, my patient’s oxygen levels had dropped severely. A breathing tube had been placed down their throat. A ventilator was now keeping them alive.

 

Recent statistics suggest that what I saw that night is not unusual. On Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that half of the 2,102 people who had tested positive for COVID-19 in his state were ages 18 to 49. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published data on March 18 showing that, from February 12 to March 16, nearly 40 percent of American COVID-19 patients who were sick enough to be hospitalized were ages 20 to 54. Twelve percent of patients with the most critical cases, requiring admission to an ICU, were ages 20 to 44. There are some caveats worth noting: The CDC was not able to determine whether the young people included in its report had underlying health conditions. And all of this is early data. We know that we are still not testing nearly enough people in the United States. The numbers may change.

..........

So much for the tale it's "old man's" disease only...

[ronwagn + 6,290]

Old people DIE from it in far greater percentages but obesity, diabetes, coronary, and pulmonary are all previously stated risk factors. 

So, why are some young people dying of covid 19? Good question. 

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

^

Well, death from the Covid-19 is due to pulmonary inflammatory disease so awful and fast that it elicits the dreaded Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome--ARDS. The mortality is about 50%. 

The question is, why do some people develop this cytokine storm (that causes ARDS) and others don't. We usually associate cytokine release with a vigorous immune system. But in this disease, just the converse is happening: the older people with waning immune systems are the very ones having such severe cytokine storms that the damage of immunologic war zones tear up the lungs and cause capillary-alveolar leaks. 

Anyway, we'll eventually learn all this stuff: it'll just be too late to save these people. This is an awful virus. That doesn't mean that it was tinkered with on some laboratory bench, but it sure raises your eyebrows. 

[James Regan + 1,776]

Tibet has many less cases than CHinaaa