Of 129 children aged 0 to 9 who caught the coronavirus in Spain, 34 landed in hospital, a rate of 26 percent. One went to intensive care. None died. Those numbers, from a Vox review of the early age data, are a useful place to start, because they show how uneven the risk is from one age group to the next.
Nobody’s risk is zero. Public health experts have grown exasperated at images of younger Americans socializing or taking spring break trips, afraid that the idea of young people having little to fear has given them a false sense of security. Death rates reach 20 percent or more among people 80 and older. Young people, though, will get the disease, a share of them will get very sick, and a smaller number will die.
Two other factors matter. Men may face a higher risk of severe symptoms and death than women: men died at a notably higher rate in the first Wuhan outbreak, and Italy has seen the same trend, though more data is needed. And people with underlying conditions, particularly heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, lung disease and cancer, face higher odds of becoming gravely ill than their age alone would suggest.
Two caveats apply. Infection rates rise with age, but it is hard to say whether children truly get infected less or just go untested because their symptoms are milder. And the data so far is preliminary.
Children, 0 to 9
Italy, South Korea and China had reported no deaths in this group. In the United States, no one under 20 had been reported in intensive care or dead as of late last week, and only 1.6 percent had been hospitalized.
Infants are the exception. A study published March 16 in the journal Pediatrics looked at more than 2,100 children in China. Most had mild symptoms, and some had none. Yet about 30 percent of the “severe” cases and more than half of the “critical” ones were in children under 1 year old. The raw numbers were small: 7 infants were critically ill and 33 severely ill. Only one-third of the children in the sample had a confirmed infection, so another pathogen could explain some cases. Young children can also pass the virus to older relatives, who are at more risk.
Teens, 10 to 19
Spain recorded 221 cases here. Fifteen people were hospitalized, 7 percent, and none needed intensive care. One died, a fatality rate of 0.4 percent. China reports that 0.2 percent of cases in this age range end in death; Italy and South Korea reported none.
Being healthy is no guarantee. CNN reported on a 12-year-old girl in Atlanta with no known health conditions who was on a ventilator.
Twenties, and then 30 to 49
Among 1,285 Spanish cases aged 20 to 29, 183 were hospitalized (14 percent), eight reached intensive care (0.6 percent) and four died (0.3 percent). The CDC lumps everyone aged 20 to 44 together: 14.3 percent hospitalized, 2 percent in intensive care, 0.1 percent dead.
For people 30 to 49, Spain counted 5,127 cases. Of those, 1,028 were hospitalized, a rate of 20 percent. Fifty-five went to intensive care (1.1 percent) and 12 died (0.2 percent). Italy’s death rate here is 0.3 percent, China’s 0.2 percent and South Korea’s 0.1 percent. In the CDC data, people 45 to 54 had 21.2 percent hospitalized, 5.4 percent in intensive care and 0.5 percent dead. Within Spain, hospitalization jumped from 17 percent for ages 30 to 39 to 23 percent for ages 40 to 49.
Jeffrey Ghazarian, 34, who lived near Los Angeles, died Thursday after five days on a ventilator. He was a cancer survivor.
Ages 50 to 69
Spain’s 6,045 cases in this band produced 2,166 hospitalizations, 36 percent. A total of 221 people (3.7 percent) went to intensive care and 83 died, 1.4 percent. Italy, China and South Korea together report fatality rates from 0.4 percent up to 3.6 percent. CDC figures keep climbing with age: for ages 55 to 64, 20.5 percent hospitalized, 4.7 percent in intensive care and 1.4 percent dead; for 65 to 74, 28.6 percent, 8.1 percent and 2.7 percent.
Age and chronic illness compound each other. Almost half of Americans aged 55 to 64 have at least one preexisting condition, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Among the 105 patients who had died in Italy as of March 4, two-thirds had three or more preexisting conditions, most commonly hypertension, followed by ischemic heart disease and diabetes mellitus.
