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An article published in The Lancet by researchers at the Observatório da Fiocruz Covid-19 found that it is increasingly common for young patients to develop the severe form of the disease. This scenario represents, according to the study “Younger Brazilians hit by COVID-19 – What are the implications?” (“Younger Brazilians affected by Covid-19: what are the implications?”, in free translation), that this age group may be highly affected by long hospital stays or post-Covid syndromes.
In the first week of 2021, the average age of critically ill patients was 66 years, in week 25, in June, the average became 51 years, 15 years younger.
If before the majority of hospitalized people were elderly, today it is the opposite. With the incidence of the virus in younger patients, the chances of sequelae due to Covid-19 between them increase. For Dr. Daniel Villela, one of the researchers involved in the study, vaccination played an important role in this change.
“At the beginning of the year, more than 50% of the cases were serious and we had more people over 60 years old. Now it’s the other way around: more than half of the hospitalization cases are of people under 60 years of age. Vaccination began with prioritizing the elderly and the economically active population was more exposed to the virus”, explained Villela.
In addition to prioritizing the elderly in the immunization campaign, the study highlighted two other factors that contributed to the change in the pandemic’s dynamics. First, the entry and increased circulation of new variants in the country. Second, the irregularity in the provision of emergency aid to the population living in poverty has led to greater relaxation in physical distance measures, as more people have had to go to the streets to work and obtain some income to feed themselves.
The Fiocruz researcher projects that the presence of variants and the high incidence of virus circulation boost the number of cases among younger people. However, he highlights that if there is progress in vaccination, the number of deaths will be lower, as this group generally has a higher recovery rate than the elderly.
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“Having more cases in younger people, most recover, even in severe cases. In other countries we have observed that with the entry of variants, such as Delta, the number of cases even increased, but the number of deaths did not, due to vaccination. Even with this reduction, the transmission level in Brazil is still very high. It is still necessary to strengthen the hospital system and maintain preventive measures. We expect a lower number of deaths, even with a high number of cases”, said the researcher.
In the capital of Rio de Janeiro, for example, about 45% of patients hospitalized in June were between 40 and 59 years old. In January of this year, nearly 70% of severe Covid-19 cases in the city were in people over 60 years of age.
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