Earlier this year, rather than locking down, the possibility of letting COVID go through the population with only restricted public health measures was touted as a possibility.
To some extent, Sweden did just that, but the “per capita death rate in Sweden is 'very high' … Sweden might have one of the highest COVID-19 deaths-per-capita rate in Europe.”
And we all know what happens when very few measures are inadvertently taken, as witnessed in Lombardy this year before the full potential impact of a COVID outbreak was known.
“Lombardy in Italy has been one of the regions in Europe worst affected by the pandemic, with more than 16000 deaths”, and health services were completely overwhelmed.
The misguided philosophy of letting COVID run its course is once again circulating in the United States among Republicans, and in youths and conservatives everywhere. The notion is that if younger people become infected, it won’t be so bad and if enough get it, then the country inches closer toward herd immunity.
The additional argument brought by this camp is that so far, COVID has killed fewer children and teenagers than seasonal influenza does in a normal year.
Further points brought forward are that a 25-year-old who contracts this disease is approximately 250 times less likely to die than an infected 85-year-old. And for every 1000 people COVID-19 infections under the age of 35, less than one dies.
The younger generation may therefore come to the twin conclusions: what are the odds that I do become infected? And if I do infected, it’s really not a big deal. Right? Wrong, on several counts.
You see, this is all so very disingenuous. COVID’s fatality rate is far higher than influenza to teenagers but school closures, social distancing and lockdowns have reduced teenage exposure to all infectious diseases including COVID.
Furthermore, COVID infection outcome is not just survived/didn’t. For the survivors there may be a vast array of chronic problems and illnesses. Even in asymptomatic patients, studies have shown that more than half of these had lung abnormalities. For symptomatic young adults, the picture is not all as rosy as “they” would have you think.
Letting COVID run through a locality in an attempt to achieve some degree of herd immunity means that “you’re also signing up for a huge number of hospitalizations, and a substantial fraction of those people will be sick for months … 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” observed Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at UC Santa Cruz.
Indeed, a very recent study from Harvard University analysed 3,222 hospitalised patients aged 18-34 and found that 20% required intensive care, 10% were ventilated and 2.7% died. Another 3% required long term recovery even after testing negative for COVID.
These “long-haulers” will experience any combination of a bewildering array of symptoms which can include chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, fevers, gastrointestinal problems, lost sense of smell, hallucinations, short-term-memory loss, etc. And furthermore, most of these chronic sufferers are typically younger and formerly healthy.
This is also being shown in Bergamo where doctors are calling back coronavirus survivors for review and tests, and half of the patients say they have not fully recovered with very varied chronic problems.
Of the first 750 patients seen, almost a third still have lung scarring and breathing trouble. Another third had residual problems linked to inflammation and clotting, such as heart abnormalities and blocked arteries. A few are even at risk of organ failure. Many continue to have a plethora of daily conditions with no clue as to when they will recover, and these include leg pains, tingling in the extremities, hair loss, depression, short term memory loss and severe fatigue.
Many of these had no pre-existing medical conditions and there seems no way to predict, in spite of the severity of the initial disease, how swiftly or how excruciatingly slowly patients recover from COVID effects.
Potentially more frightening is that which we cannot yet know with regard to the very long term consequences of COVID infection. “We know that hepatitis C leads to liver cancer, we know that human papillomavirus leads to cervical cancer, we know that HIV leads to certain cancers … we have no idea whether having had this infection means that, 10 years from now, you have an elevated risk of lymphoma” for example, averred Howard Forman, a health-policy professor at Yale.
Moreover, attempting to reach partial herd immunity by exposing only low-risk groups is equally fallacious. It is impossible to truly distinguish between high and low-risk groups and to really keep them separate. The young and old mingle, whether they want to or not.
Attempting elderly-cocooning while encouraging young people to gamble with their long-term health is impossible to achieve, illogical and goes against the scientific evidence. The short term solution is the standard public health advice (hygiene, social distancing, masks etc) and a longer term solution is a safe and effective vaccine.