Herd immunity case weakens with Covid-19 the leading cause of death among young in some US regions: study

Doctors angry at US President Trump’s claim that American physicians and hospitals are inflating data, including coronavirus-related deaths

British study finds more than 70 per cent of young coronavirus patients had one or more damaged organs four months after infection

Reading Time:3 minutes

Researchers say the new coronavirus is the biggest killer of young people in New York and 10 other American states, concluding that more people aged 25-44 have died of Covid-19 than official statistics show. Photo: AFP

Published: 7:00am, 27 Oct 2020Updated: 7:00am, 27 Oct 2020

Coronavirus has likely become the leading cause of death among young people in some regions of the United States, according to a new study.

For people aged between 25 and 44 living in one of 11 states with high infection rates – such as New York, Arkansas and Arizona – the chance of dying from Covid-19 is greater than any other risk, the researchers found.

In these states, 2,450 young adults died of coronavirus between March and July, slightly more than those killed in 2018 (the latest figure available) by accidental drug overdose, previously the leading cause of death in this age group.

“In these regions, Covid-19 mortality also resembles that of the HIV/Aids epidemic at its apex in the United States,” said the team led by Dr Jeremy Samuel Faust of the Harvard Medical School in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on medrxiv.org on Sunday.

Faust and his colleagues examined the data released by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that in 2020 the number of deaths from all causes among young people to the end of July this year was a quarter higher than the same period last year.