A paramedic transports a patient to an emergency room at Hackensack Meridian Health Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, New Jersey, on December 11, 2020.
I have Betancur | AFP | Getty Images
Dr. Paul Offit, a doctor at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, said he now sees more patients with a rare inflammatory disease, a complication of Covid-19, than he has ever witnessed since the pandemic began.
In Texas, Dr. James McDeavitt, dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, said he and his colleagues notice an increase in admissions of youth with Covid-19, although he did not yet have data for support the anecdote. tests.
Both doctors attributed the increase in hospital visits to adolescents and young adults, at least in part, to B.1.1.7, the coronavirus variant first identified in the UK that according to health officials public is now the most common strain circulating in the US. the variant is highly contagious, it is believed to be approximately 60% more transmissible than the original strain of the virus.
“I think they are getting infected more often because of the contagiousness of the virus,” said Offit, a health expert in the fields of virology and immunology, who has also been a member of advisory panels for the Control Centers and Disease Prevention. Food and Drug Administration. “That’s why I think you’ll see and see more disease” in children and young adults.
CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said earlier this month that hospitals are seeing more and more younger adults admitted with Covid-19 as more contagious variants of the virus that are spreading faster than ever. Across the country, the number of young people aged 18 to 64 visiting emergency services with Covid is increasing, while the number of visits between patients aged 65 and over is declining, according to a slide presented by Walensky during a briefing from last week.
“Cases and emergency room visits have increased,” Walensky said. “We are seeing these increases in younger adults, most of whom have not yet been vaccinated.”
In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week that the state is seeing an increase in the Covid positivity rate among people ages 18-24. In Michigan, where Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising rapidly, case rates are highest for those 19 and under, according to state data released on April 6th. Hospital admissions are increasing for all age groups, with the largest increase in people between the ages of 40 and 49, according to state data.
Health experts say the problem is multifaceted: older teens and younger adults were among the last to be prioritized to get the Covid-19 vaccines, and many of them have not yet received the vaccines. In addition, young adults are believed to engage in riskier behaviors, such as practicing close contact sports, going out to bars, attending meetings without masks, or traveling.
These factors along with variant B.1.1.7, which is highly contagious, are likely to cause an increase in young people going to the hospital, health experts say.
We are seeing “less disease in the elderly due to vaccination, so we will proportionally see more disease in young adults,” said Dr. Stephen Schrantz, an infectious disease expert at UChicago Medicine, who added that it is not yet clear how much of this the increase is due only to strain B.1.1.7.
Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said there is emerging evidence that B.1.1.7 causes more symptoms and more serious illnesses. He said health officials in the United States and other countries where tension is frequent may see a shift toward unvaccinated youth ending up in hospitals or even the ICU.
“There are things that don’t work in our favor right now, which is B.1.1.7 and other variants of concern,” he said.
Although there are more young people who could get sick, Schrantz, from Uchichago, said he does not expect many of them to get seriously ill, especially school-age children. He said young adults with comorbidities such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes are probably the ones most at risk.
“The severity of the disease is based primarily on two factors: the virus and the host,” he said.
“Even though the virus is changing, I don’t think mutations in the spike protein have increased virulence in children because their body, and more specifically their immune system, reacts less severely to the virus. In other words, , I think the host is the most important variable compared to changes in the virus, “he said.
Offit said he expects things to improve as the U.S. vaccinates more adults, regardless of age, and added that the virus will spread from person to person as more antibodies become available.
As of Thursday, more than 125 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to data collected by the CDC. It is approximately 37% of the total US population.
Young people “live in the herd,” Offit said. “The more the herd is vaccinated, the less the virus can spread.”