Shifting Younger
The trend, meanwhile, accompanies a shift within hospitals to younger patient populations. Just shy of 90% of Americans 65 or older have received at least one vaccine dose, according to CDC data. Coverage is far sparser among the young, leading to more people in their 30s, 40s and 50s becoming hospitalized with Covid-19—and some are in their 20s or children, providers say.
The differences in vaccination rates makes it difficult to disentangle whether delta is really making people sicker, or it’s just running rampant among younger people, said Harbaksh Sangha, chief medical officer of Lake Regional Health System in Missouri.
“Even if you see a similar death rate, in your mind you know, a 40-year-old, we weren’t supposed to lose them,” Sangha said. “They weren’t supposed to die.”
In Missouri, new Covid-19 hospitalizations among all age groups under 60 spiked higher last week than they did early this year, during the state’s winter surge.
Covid-19 deaths in the state, meanwhile, have remained at low levels, with 24 confirmed in the last week. Medical providers have also gained some new tools to treat the disease over the course of the pandemic that may lead to better outcomes. And deaths are known to be a lagging indicator with Covid-19, usually rising a few weeks after cases surge.
But lately, Lake Regional Health System’s 100-bed hospital located in Missouri’s the Lake of the Ozarks region, a popular summer vacation destination, is filling up. About 30% of its patients on a recent Tuesday had Covid-19, including about half those in intensive care, according to Sangha.
Cases among younger people echo one grisly feature of the fearsome 1918 influenza pandemic, which was known for unusually high death rates among young adults. Usually flu deaths are concentrated among young children and the elderly, while sparing those in between.
“Men and women in their 20s and 30s were getting very sick and dying,” said E. Thomas Ewing, a history professor at Virginia Tech who studies the 1918 pandemic. The reasons for the severity still aren’t completely clear, he said.
Data from the U.K. suggests that the risk of hospitalization within two weeks of contracting the delta variant is more than twice as high as with alpha, the strain that surfaced in the southern county of Kent, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Sam Fazeli wrote in a mid-June report. The number of people going to the emergency room or getting hospitalized with delta is about 45% greater, he said.
“I think it’s possible, if not probable, that there’s more rapid disease progression,” said Alabama’s Saag, who said he hasn’t seen data to back up that impression. “That fits with the biology.”
—With assistance from Andre Tartar.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.