One in 20 people will need hospital care if they get Covid-19, study estimates
- Researchers find those with underlying conditions are likely to make up ‘a large proportion of the additional health care burden’
- They say more efforts are needed to shield people at increased risk, including with more intensive physical distancing measures
About one in 20 people worldwide – or 349 million – who are at high risk of severe illness from Covid-19 will need hospital treatment such as oxygen therapy if they contract the disease, according to a new study.
Researchers from Britain, the US and China, led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, made the estimate based on health data for 188 countries and UN population projections for 2020.
They concluded that “a large proportion of the additional health care burden” from Covid-19 was likely to come from people with underlying conditions. And without a vaccine, more efforts were needed to shield those at-risk people from contracting the disease, they said.
“Identifying at-risk populations is important not only for making projections of the probable health burden in countries, but also for the design of effective strategies that aim to reduce the risk of transmission to people in target groups,” the researchers wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in The Lancet on June 15.
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The researchers estimated that about 1.7 billion people – or 22 per cent of the world’s population – had at least one underlying medical condition that put them at increased risk of becoming seriously ill if they contracted Covid-19. But for many of them, their conditions might not be diagnosed or recorded in the local health system, and the risk could be more modest.