Amid the surge of the Delta variant in the US, hospitalization rates for the adults in their 30s due to Covid-19 have hit record highs, making it the “pandemic of the young”.
New Covid-19 hospital admissions for patients in their 30s reached an average of 1,113 per day for the week that ended Wednesday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That average daily hospitalization rate had jumped 22.6 percent from 908 in the previous seven days, according to the CDC.
“All of these younger age groups that we previously thought were relatively spared from severe outcomes from Covid up to 50 years, those hospital admission rates are all moving upwards at a dizzying pace, unfortunately,” Dr. James Lawler, co-director of the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
ALSO READ: Covid Cases Surge in Worst-Hit Australia State
“So this is not only the pandemic of the unvaccinated in the US, it’s a pandemic of the young now,” he added.
The CDC data shows that thirty-somethings made up 170,852 out of more than 2.5 million new hospital admissions for Covid-19 since August 2020, the report said.
The data shows that the seven-day average for new hospitalizations among those aged 18 to 29 reached 694 on Wednesday, up 20.7 percent from the 575 on average the week prior. There have been 124,633 people aged 18 to 29 hospitalized since August.
The average daily hospitalization rate for children under 17 also shot up a shocking 31.2 percent, from 201 to 263, the CDC data shows. There have been 47,172 hospitalizations of minor children from Covid-19 since last August.
Children under age 12 remain ineligible to get the Covid-19 vaccine, while vaccination rates for young adults under 40 continue to lag.
CDC vaccination data trends show that only 49.6 percent of adults aged 25 to 39 are considered fully vaccinated – while 45.1 percent of adults aged 18 to 24 are fully vaccinated.
ALSO READ: WHO Trial to Study Potential of 3 Anti-Malarial Drugs Against Covid
“It is not just a huge proportion of patients admitted to the ICU with Covid, it is also a much younger demographic than we’ve seen previously,” Lawler said.
“And again, I think this is another myth that young people don’t get very sick. And that is clearly not the case, particularly with Delta waves,” he noted.
