Covid-19: Are young people immune?

	Covid-19
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Covid-19: Are young people immune?
(as of May 2020)
No, they are not. They are less likely to die of it, and less likely to get extremely sick, but many young people spent several days in a hospital with high fever and problems breathing (as a friend said, "it feels like you are drowning"). Not fun. And thousands have died, including a famous one: the 35-year-old doctor who first spoke about it in China. There seems to be a limit to how many viruses your immune system can fight. If you expose yourself repeatedly, you may die of it, and this may explain why the number of young fatalities seems to be increasing everywhere. Update of April 11: this article in Science Magazine details the lifelong complications that may affect young people who recover from this virus. The virus targets the lungs, causing "exceptionally severe lung injury". A lack of oxygen and widespread prolonged inflammation will also damage the kidneys, liver, heart, brain, and so on. This increases the risk of future illnesses such as kidney diseases, strokes and heart attacks. And don't forget that spending any amount of time in an intensive care unit (ICU) is a danger in itself, both physical and psychological. It is basically like having a strong pneumonia: you may never be normal again, i.e. your life expectancy may be significantly reduced.
The statistics are still confusing. Young healthy people seem to be largely immune in Europe and the USA, but this is not necessarily true everywhere. The first major cluster in Latin America was in the Guayas region of Ecuador, which is one of the youngest in the country (only 11% of its people are over 60). The infections and the deaths in Singapore and Saudi Arabia are mostly among foreign migrant workers, but most of them are very young and, by definition, in good health. On the other hand, Japan has the world's oldest population and has only a fraction of the deaths that Italy has. We are waiting to see what happens in Africa. Africa is the world's youngest continent, with more than 60% of its population under age 25. If young people are not affected by covid-19, then Africa should have the lowest infection rates and the lowest death rates and the lowest long-term consequences, certainly lower compared with the very old populations of Italy and France.
There is also a practical reason to be worried regardless of age: when hospitals are overwhelmed with emergencies, it's a lottery who gets treated. The rate at which a region becomes infected makes a big difference in whether there will be enough hospital beds and doctors to treat the sick and the injured: it takes weeks or months to expand a hospital's capacity, it takes weeks or months to train nurses, and it takes years to train a new doctor. You may have a car accident and be left bleeding to death because all the doctors and nurses are busy with covid-19 patients and there is no blood available anyway. We know how many people died of covid-19 in Wuhan but don't know how many people died of totally unrelated causes simply because Wuhan hospitals couldn't take care of them. The problem is compounded by the fact that doctors themselves get sick and sometimes die (notably the Chinese doctor who first reported the epidemic), thus reducing the number of available doctors. During a serious health crisis, you cannot count on a doctor and a hospital bed when you get sick of any other disease or you get injured playing soccer.
In September 2020 Betsy Herold's group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York presented a theory why children are mostly immune from covid19: a child's immune system is mostly untrained to fight specific pathogens and that seems to be an advantage in the case of this specific virus. Later in life the immune system has been trained to fight the pathogens that it has encountered and is less prepared to fight unknown ones (paper).
At the end of April, British scientists warned that covid-19 may be tied to a rare syndrome in children, and within two weeks similar cases were reported in New York, and on May 12 a report by Tongji Hospital in Wuhan described cases of children who were hospitalized with non-respiratory symptoms but were positive for covid-19: in other words they were not sick of the typical covid-19 symptoms but they were sick nonetheless. Very few children died, but nobody knows the long-term consequences on the health of the children that are infected with the virus.
At the same time, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York reported five cases of stroke in patients younger than 50 infected with covid-19 (paper) and two weeks later Jamaica Hospital in New York reported similar cases (paper). There's a chance that, even when the immune system successfully defeats the virus, the immune system is left somehow "damaged", with unknown consequences for the person's future health.
In July Eike Nagel's team at University Hospital Frankfurt in Germany founds that many recovered asymptomatic patients and patients with mild symptoms had persistent heart abnormalities (paper).
Multiple studies of asymptomatic patients show that more than half of them had lasting damage to their lungs: a Korean study (paper), a study by Hong Kong University (paper), a study by Saitama Medical University in Japan (paper), etc.
A French study showed that about 1.2% of infected men in their 30s require hospitalization (paper). If you are hospitalized, the chances that you will be left with a chronic illness is not negligible.
CDC data show that about one third of covid survivors in the age group of 18-34 is left with symptoms like fatigue and coughing for weeks. Ed Yong has coined the term "long-haulers" for the people who don't die of covid-19 but experience all sorts of long-term symptoms: chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, fevers, gastrointestinal problems, erratic heartbeat, and even hallucinations and memory loss.
A study by Todd McDevitt's team at UC San Francisco shows that covid-19 damages heart cells (paper).
We just don't know the long-term damage caused by covid-19 on young people. For example, we know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, that papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, that HIV increases the chances of certain cancers, but we don't know what a covid-19 survivor will suffer in the future. Countries like the USA may be left with millions of people with lifelong illnesses.
The idea of a virus that works like a time bomb, causing no symptoms for a while but then causing a disability later in life, isn't new: polio can cause paralysis years after the virus has left the body.
See also:
Back to FAQ/ Q&A about Covid-19,
Data on Covid-19 and selected sources,
Covid-19: How it may change the World,
The Clown & the Virus,
The Clown & the Virus - Part 2,
Trump's Virus,
Sinophobia & Covid-19,
Sinophobia & Covid-19 in US Media,
Was covid-19 made in the USA? in China? TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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