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Hundreds of young Americans have now been killed by the coronavirus, data shows
[WashingtonPost] He also was among at least 759 people under age 50 across the United States who have perished amid the deepening pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis of state data. These deaths underscore the tragic fact that while the novel coronavirus might be most threatening to the old and compromised, no one is immune.For the very young — people under the age of 20 — death is extremely rare in the current pandemic. But it happens: The Post identified nine such cases. The risk appears to rise with every decade of age. The Post found at least 45 deaths among people in their 20s, at least 190 deaths among people in their 30s, and at least 413 deaths among people in their 40s. Determining a precise number for each category is difficult because of the divergent ways states present age groups. Shawn Evans, attending emergency physician and director of resuscitation at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, said the vast majority of young people who contract the disease fare well and recover. But for a minority, it appears to cause a unique change in the blood’s oxygen-carrying hemoglobin cells. “Young people who are otherwise fit can tolerate this longer, but at the expense of their heart and their pulmonary functions,” said Evans, who likened some of the symptoms in younger people to prolonged carbon monoxide exposure. He said younger patients he has seen tend to come in later, after battling the disease at home for longer. But for those who take a tragic turn, it often happens quickly. “When they do deteriorate, they do so much more dramatically,” he said. In those cases, Evans said, the lack of oxygen makes the right side of the heart work extra hard, which leads to pulmonary hypertension. “The lungs clamp down. They can’t get blood flow into the lungs.” What has profoundly struck Evans and his colleagues is the seeming randomness of the type of young people who are unable to fight off the disease. “A very fit 30-year-old triathlete is just as vulnerable as a chess-playing 45-year-old who gets no exercise,” he said. “We just don’t know who it is that this virus carries the master key to.” Jean-Laurent Casanova, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and physician at Rockefeller University Hospital, suspects vulnerability to the virus among some young people may be partly encoded in their DNA. For more than two decades, Casanova has studied “inborn errors of immunity,” or genetic conditions that make people susceptible to certain diseases. These conditions — often caused by a single mutation in a single gene — can hinder the immune system’s response to a particular virus or bacteria, explaining why a subset of seemingly healthy young people get extremely sick. In 2015, his lab discovered a toddler with a life-threatening case of influenza had a mutation in the gene that codes for a specific type of immune protein that warns cells of an attack. When the researchers genetically engineered mice to have that same mutation, they found the mice were significantly more vulnerable to the virus. Now, Casanova is collecting genetic material from young people in more than 100 countries who have fallen severely ill with the coronavirus. His hope is that the genomes will reveal “candidate” mutations that might explain susceptibility to the virus. “Step one is to understand,” Casanova said. But if he can identify a mutation and test it in the lab, “step two is: How can you prevent it, how can you fix it?” Illnesses caused by inborn errors of immunity are helpful for understanding the behavior of a virus, he said, because they are “clean cases,” uncomplicated by age or underlying conditions. And they can often provide clues in the search for a cure. For example, Casanova has found people are more susceptible to tuberculosis when they have a pair of mutations that cause low levels of gamma interferon, a protein that fights the genus of bacteria that causes TB. Fortunately, he said, gamma interferon has been available as a drug for more than 30 years, making it a promising potential treatment for the disease. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2020-05-27 |
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