Millennials come to grips with risks
Until several days ago, some bars and restaurants were still packed with St. Patrick’s Day crowds. Beaches were full. And it seemed as if many young adults were slow to take steps to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
“I kept hearing, ‘Eighty percent of cases are mild,’ ” said Christian Heuer, 32, of Los Angeles, who tested positive for the virus last week and has been running a low-grade fever for six days. “But this is not just a sniffly runny nose. It’s the real deal. You’re really sick.”
His girlfriend, Natasha Wynnyk, 28, felt fine for several days after Heuer got sick, and she thought she might be impervious to infection. Then her fever spiked Monday evening, and she started experiencing severe and sharp aches in her back, joints and fingers, which she compared to a feeling of being stabbed.
The couple are part of a worrying trend suggesting that young people may have contributed to the pandemic’s spread in the United States and other countries by going about business as usual for too long, perhaps believing that being young and healthy protected them from infection.
But preliminary figures released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that adults ages 20 to 44 represent nearly one-third of U.S. coronavirus patients whose ages are known.
Younger adults are generally more resilient than older people, but an increase in chronic health conditions among millennials, in their 20s and 30s now, has made them less hardy than they might think. They have seen rising levels of obesity and illnesses such as Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as an increase in heart disease and some cancers. These are strongly associated with poor outcomes from coronavirus infection.
Although the risk of hospitalization or dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, increases with each decade of life, according to the CDC’s recent analysis of cases, the agency found that young adults can develop severe disease: Of 508 patients admitted to hospitals, 20 percent were 20 to 44 years old. Some younger people do die of the disease, at a rate of about one or two per 1,000 cases.
The report’s authors cautioned that their analysis was limited because much of their data was incomplete, and that information about chronic health conditions that affect the severity of disease was missing.
But many news reports have consistently emphasized that the elderly and those in poor health are the most vulnerable and most likely to die.
“The message has been that if you’re younger and generally healthy, you’re going to be fine, and I think that’s the wrong message,” said Mila Clarke Buckley, 30, who writes about living with Type 2 diabetes on her blog, Hangry Woman, and creates sponsored content for FreeStyle Libre, a continuous glucose monitoring system. “It makes young people feel that invincibility they already feel about their health.”
Living with diabetes puts Buckley at heightened risk for severe illness if she were to become infected, she said, so she has stopped traveling out of town. She is also staying home more and practicing social distancing — even with her husband, who is still going out to work.
“He has a cold right now, so we are sleeping in separate bedrooms,” Buckley said from her home in Houston. “We know that if I get sick it’s a big deal — it may impact me a lot harder.”
Buckley said she had turned down her sister-in-law, who had invited the entire extended family over for dinner, now that restaurants were offering limited service.
“We told her we don’t think it’s a good idea to gather, and perhaps she should rethink it,” she said.
But staying home and practicing social distancing may take a greater toll on young adults as they face additional mental health challenges, especially if they live alone or struggle with anxiety or depression, said Benjamin F. Miller, a psychologist who is the chief strategy officer for Well
Being Trust, a national foundation focusing on mental and spiritual health.
“Many of our millennials already feel socially disconnected, and this exacerbates those ongoing feelings these folks already had,” Miller said.
Like many millennials, Will Lanier, a 34-year-old from Austin, works at home, running the Out Foundation, a wellness and fitness organization for LGBTQ people that he founded. He lives alone and worries about the desolation he might feel if classes at his CrossFit gym are shut down.
“FaceTime can only do so much, and human interaction is so important,” Lanier said.
While people often make a point of reaching out to older relatives or neighbors who live alone, he said, “people don’t check on young people.”
“It’s just me and my dog — I’ll go days without talking with someone,” he said. “If I slipped in the shower, it’d be days before anyone found me.”