Herd Immunity? Not So Fast
[1] Even though it doesn't kill them frequently, Covid-19 can cause a number of long-term, potentially chronic, injuries to vital organs in young people:
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“If you’re signing up for herd immunity, you’re also signing up for a huge number of hospitalizations, and a substantial fraction of those people will be sick for months,” says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease researcher at UC Santa Cruz. “Do the symptoms last three months? Six months? Three years? Nobody knows, but I wouldn’t want my pandemic plan to be Let’s have hundreds of thousands of young people with lifelong illnesses. I wouldn’t want to tell 30-to-50-year-olds that we’ve signed them up for a high risk of heart disease and chronic organ damage.”
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And what do those potentially life-long illnesses look like?
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COVID-19 presents an array of health challenges that are serious, if not imminently fatal. The disease occasionally sends people’s immune system into a frenzy, wreaking havoc on their internal organs. Several studies of asymptomatic patients revealed that more than half of them had lung abnormalities. A March study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that 7 to 20 percent of sick patients showed heart damage associated with COVID-19.
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[2] It's extraordinarily difficult to separate high and low-risk groups:
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The U.S. is not, for the most part, spatially segregated by age. Restaurants and stores serve old and young patrons, and there are tens of millions of multigenerational households. Evidence that young and old people mingle constantly can be seen in the recent COVID-19 death data: A southern surge that started among young people spread to older populations, who died in disproportionate numbers. “There is the assumption that we can start cocooning the elderly, but we have no new innovation here,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant biostatistics professor at the University of Florida.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/what-young-healthy-people-have-fear-covid-19/616087/