Younger Age and COVID

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Anchor lead: US populations with COVID-19 are often younger than those seen elsewhere, Elizabeth Tracey reports

One risk factor for more severe COVID-19 disease that emerged from China and Europe was older age, but as the pandemic has spread across the US, more younger people seem to be requiring hospitalization. That’s according to Lisa Maragakis, director of infection control at Johns Hopkins.

Maragakis: We have seen a much younger population of patients admitted to the hospital and even requiring intensive care and sometimes unfortunately dying from the infection. Initially reports centered around older individuals and those with a lot of comorbidities, underlying heart disease, pulmonary disease, diabetes, and now we see a much wider, in the United States, age distribution, really from the majority of patients from the ages of thirty to sixty.  :33

Maragakis says death rates remain higher in those older than 60. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.