Nobody’s risk is zero when it comes to the Covid-19 coronavirus. Anybody can get sick in this pandemic. But different people have different risks of getting severe symptoms that require hospitalization or intensive care — and the chances of dying from Covid-19 vary widely across age groups.
The conventional wisdom says kids and young people may be fine even if they get infected, with the risk of a case being more severe increasing with age. It’s the older folks, we need to worry about, this thinking says, given death rates reach 20 percent or more among people 80 and older. Public health experts have seemed exasperated by the social media images of younger Americans who continue to socialize or even take a spring break vacation, worried that the perception a young person has little to fear from the coronavirus has given them a false sense of security.
To be clear, nobody should feel invulnerable to the coronavirus. Young people are going to contract the disease, a not-insignificant percentage of them are going to get very sick, and a smaller number will die. The rates of severe and deadly cases might not be nearly as high as the older generations that we are worried about, but the data already show that age alone does not make you invincible. (Text courtesy vox.com)
