Young not more prone to Covid in 2nd wave: Govt
Young people aren’t more vulnerable to the second wave of coronavirus infections in India when compared to the first, said top government medical experts on Monday, citing official hospital data to establish that there was no dramatic shift in the age profile of Covid-19 patients from last year.
In an official briefing, Dr VK Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog and Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said data coming from the ground showed that young people contributed roughly the same caseload to the current outbreak as the one that ravaged India last year. They claimed that need for oxygen and shortness of breath was seen more among patients in this wave.
“If we look at age profiles, we will see in the last year people under 30 years contributed 31 per cent of the cases and now it is 32 per cent, so essentially there is no difference. There is
no overarching excess of young people becoming Covid positive. The main point we are making is essentially we do not see a shift in the age prevalence of Covid-19 overall in the country,” said Paul.
Bhargava said only a marginally high proportion of patients were younger and that the average of patients in the first wave was 50 and in this wave, was 49. “From zero to 19 years - the difference was 5.8% versus 4.2%, and in 20-40 years, the difference was 25 per cent versus 23 per cent. There is a marginal difference in this,” he said.
The data set was taken from the National Clinical Covid-19 Registry that ICMR launched in
September last year. The data of 9,485 patients, from August 2020 to April 2021, was taken for the analysis. “The changes that we have seen are that oxygen utilisation has increased to 54.5% in the second wave, from 41.1% that was seen during the first wave last year. And requirement for ventilation has gone down from 37.3 to 27.8% between the two waves,” said Bhargava.
Shortness of breath was seen in 47.5% hospitalised positive cases this year as compared to 41.7% last year, he added. The first wave data was taken from September to November 2020, and second wave data between February and April, 2021.
“The good news is that the death profile has not seen much change...It is 9.6% hospitalised patients in the first wave and 9.7% among patients in the second wave,” he said.
The analysis also found that in both the waves, 70% of those hospitalised were above 40. Among 20-40, 23.7% hospitalisations were seen during the first wave, and 25.5% in the second.