Many New York coronavirus patients are young, surprising doctors
- About one in five patients hospitalised with Covid-19 are under 44, according to data from city’s health department
- New York has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in US, and many do not fit picture coming out of China or Italy
Younger adults in New York City are being hospitalised with Covid-19 infections at surprisingly high rates, said doctors and other health care workers treating them, undermining earlier assumptions about who’s most at risk from the new coronavirus.
New York has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in the US, and about one in five hospitalisations are occurring in people under age 44, according to data released by the city’s health department.
Globally, moderate-to-severe cases have occurred in 10 to 15 per cent of adults under age 50, according to the World Health Organisation.
On Friday at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, a previously healthy 32-year-old male patient turned to doctor Kaedrea Jackson and asked: “Am I going to die?”
People are scared. These are patients where you’re thinking: ‘This just shouldn’t be happening to you. You’re so young. Why is this happening?
The young man, who had no underlying medical conditions, was short of breath with a fever, and his oxygen levels were dropping rapidly.
He had come to the hospital’s emergency department four days earlier but was told to go home, drink water, take Tylenol and self-isolate. Now he was back and his condition was deteriorating.