Locking up the olds and letting this rip still has some drawbacks.
Coronavirus: Nearly 800 people under the age of 50 have died in the US
Alex Woodward, The Independent
Nearly 200 people in the US in their thirties have died from coronavirus, among the nearly 800 people under age 50 who have died following the outbreak.
At least 45 Americans in their twenties have died from the Covid-19 disease caused by the virus, not including another nine deaths involving people under 20 years old, according to data collected by The Washington Post.
One third of young deaths had no known co-morbidity. Doctors have little idea what factors increase their risk. It may be genes, which is yet another reason to hammer this down and delay this round. Gene and blood tests might enable us to figure out who was high risk of being hospitalized.
How many deaths among the under 50 will the average person tolerate before they stop sending their kids to school out of fear?
Hundreds of young Americans have now been killed by the coronavirus, data shows
Chris Mooney, Brady Denis, Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post
Similarly, in New York, 64 percent of patients between the ages of 30 and 39 who died of the disease suffered from a preexisting condition, usually high blood pressure or diabetes. But that still leaves about a third of cases without such a possible contributing factor.
He said younger patients he has seen tend to come in later, after battling the disease at home for longer. But for those who take a tragic turn, it often happens quickly.
“When they do deteriorate, they do so much more dramatically,” he said.
In those cases, Evans said, the lack of oxygen makes the right side of the heart work extra hard, which leads to pulmonary hypertension. “The lungs clamp down. They can’t get blood flow into the lungs.”
What has profoundly struck Evans and his colleagues is the seeming randomness of the type of young people who are unable to fight off the disease.
“A very fit 30-year-old triathlete is just as vulnerable as a chess-playing 45-year-old who gets no exercise,” he said. “We just don’t know who it is that this virus carries the master key to.”
How many deaths will it take to get “herd immunity”, assuming that herd immunity is still possible?
There are still too many unknowns. In the USA, total known infections are 500,000, so we know 1 in 660 of the population are infected. True infections are larger, but some of the deaths from this half million are still yet to play out.