How much will the novel coronavirus affect you?
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/11/21173157/coronavirus-health-effects-age-covid-risk-diabetes-hypertension-disease-isolation
Reported today in The Verge.
How much will the novel coronavirus affect you?
Nearly everyone in the US will be affected in some way by the COVID-19 pandemic, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus - by stress and anxiety, event closures, or the illness itself. There's cause for concern: the disease can be deadly, and the outbreak in the US is likely to continue to get worse.
There's still a lot that scientists and doctors don't know about the new coronavirus and the illness it causes. With three months of data, though, it appears that around 80 percent of people who are infected have a mild or moderate illness, around 15 percent have severe disease (which requires hospitalization), and around 5 percent are critical (and go into respiratory or organ failure). Around 3 percent of people with confirmed cases of the infection in China died, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Different groups of people, though, are more likely to fall into the severe or critical categories than others:
The elderly: People who are over the age of 60 are at a higher risk of developing a severe case of COVID-19, according to data collected by the WHO. The highest death rate is in people above the age of 80. Around 15 percent of people in that age group died from the disease in one set of Chinese patients. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that people who are older stay away from crowds and avoid nonessential travel.
Children: Children, on the other hand, don't appear to get as sick. Very few develop the disease, in the first place, and if they do, only a small group develop severe or critical disease. No young children have died from the virus in China.
Researchers are still trying to figure out why that's the case. It may be that children's