A new study of thousands of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the New York City area, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, has found that nearly all of them had at least one major chronic health condition, and most — 88 percent — had at least two.
NB: 88 percent of hospitalised patients had two or more major chronic health conditions.
The article continues:
Though earlier research has shown chronic conditions like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are common risk factors for severe Covid-19, the ubiquity of serious medical conditions in these patients was striking: Only 6 percent of them had no underlying health conditions.
“The number of patients who had chronic comorbidities surprised us,” said Karina Davidson, a senior vice president at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, who was the paper’s senior author.
Dozens (not hundreds or thousands) of children and teenagers got sick but survived, the researchers found. Women had a clear edge: Fewer were hospitalised to begin with, and they were more likely to survive.
This takes earlier reports on this site even further. For those who are young, which could now count as under seventy, with no prior chronic health problems, the risks are absolutely miniscule. In past epidemics over thousands of years the practice of quarantining the sick has been rightly used. Quarantining the healthy has NEVER been seen as sensible before, and it isn’t now.
Reference.
The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed data about 5,700 Covid-19 patients admitted between March 1 and April 4 to a dozen hospitals in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County that are part of the Northwell Health system. Scientists at the Feinstein Institutes, the research arm of Northwell, used electronic health records and other demographic information to analyze the characteristics of the patients.