Does the Delta variant make young adults “sicker, faster”?



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Many hospital patients have underlying health conditions like diabetes, obesity or high blood pressure which are risk factors for serious illness, he said. But some younger patients do not have any of these risk factors.

“That’s what really scares me,” he said. “It hits healthy people younger than you would think have such a bad response to disease.” They often face prolonged recoveries, Dr Coulter added, and some will have lasting lung damage.

In the United States, the Delta variant is a relatively new arrival, and the evidence for its different behavior and behavior is still accumulating. It’s more contagious, experts agree. People who are infected can carry the variant in large amounts in their airways, according to some studies.

The variant can also cause more serious illness, some researchers have suggested. A study in Scotland, published in The Lancet, looked at cases of Covid in the spring, when Delta became the dominant strain in that country.

Patients infected with the variant were almost twice as likely to be hospitalized as those infected with the earlier Alpha variant. The patients were also younger, likely because they were the last to be vaccinated, the authors said.

In a preliminary study published online and not yet peer reviewed, Canadian researchers found that the risk of being admitted to intensive care was almost four times higher in patients with the Delta variant, compared to patients with the Delta variant. infected with other variants. Patients with the Delta variant were twice as likely to be hospitalized or die.

Research in Singapore, due for publication in The Lancet, concluded that patients with the Delta variant were more likely to need oxygen, intensive care, or die. And a study in India, which has also been published online and not yet peer reviewed, found that in the second wave of infection, when the Delta variant was dominant, patients were at greater risk of death, especially those under 45 years old.

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