New story in Health from Time: More Young People Are Testing Positive for COVID-19 in the U.S. Here’s What That Could Mean for the Outbreak

Despite the many things we don’t know about COVID-19, one thing has been repeated so often and so loudly it seems almost indisputable: elderly people are more likely than young people to get sick and die from COVID-19.

More recent data, however, show a more complex picture. Older people do seem more likely to die from COVID-19—but they aren’t necessarily more likely to get infected.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from mid-March found that about half of U.S. COVID-19 patients with known ages at that time were 55 or older—even though only 29% of the country’s population is that old. Over time, though, the data has settled to better reflect the country’s overall age distribution (with the exception of kids 19 and younger, who still make up a very small portion of infections).

The CDC’s most recent data, published on June 19, shows that nearly 70% of people in the U.S. who tested positive as of May 30 were younger than 60. The median age of U.S. COVID-19 patients during that time was 48, and it’s even lower in the country’s newer hotspots like Florida and Arizona, where case counts are surging.

Testing likely plays a part in the shifting profile of COVID-19 patients. In the beginning of the outbreak, when tests were in short supply, only the sickest patients could get a test. Since many of the sickest patients are elderly, they were over-represented in the data early on. But now, with testing much easier to come by, public-health networks are able to capture more mild and asymptomatic cases, which includes many younger people who probably wouldn’t have gotten tested in March or April.

“The more testing we do, the closer we get to the truth,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. “What we were doing before was skewed to the oldest ages.”

Recent trends suggest infection rates are going up in the U.S. for all groups, including for younger people. If we were simply detecting more cases via more robust testing—as opposed to more infections actually occurring—Dean says she’d expect the overall percentage of tests that come back positive to go down, since more people who ultimately test negative would also be included in the data. That’s not happening in current COVID-19 hotspots like Texas, Florida and Arizona, which suggests a change in the underlying outbreak. More people of all ages seem to be getting sick in these areas, and we now have enough tests to see it happening.

Even with more testing, the trends for severe disease and deaths are quite consistent.

The oldest patients (as well as those with underlying health conditions) are still the most likely to die and become hospitalized from COVID-19, just as they’ve been throughout the outbreak. There might be slight fluctuations in the coming weeks—it takes a while, after someone gets infected, for them to get sick enough to need hospitalization—but “unless there’s a spike in infections in older people, we don’t expect a dramatic change in terms of hospitalizations,” Dean says.

Because it’s been so clear that elderly adults and people with other health problems are at highest risk of severe disease, older adults may also be more cautious than younger ones as society reopens, Dean says—perhaps not rushing out to gyms, bars and restaurants with quite the same speed, and thus protecting themselves from possible exposure.

If young people throw caution to the wind, though, it may have ripple effects for older and more vulnerable people. Young, healthy people who get mild or asymptomatic disease can still be carriers, potentially transmitting the virus to someone who goes on to have a much more severe case.

“With younger age of recent infections in at least some places such as Florida, expect a lower death rate in this wave …until the 20-40 year olds who are infected today go on to infect others….,” former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden wrote on Twitter on June 21.

For the sake of personal and community health, Dean says, it’s still important for people of all ages to practice social distancing and wear masks in public.

New story in Health from Time: COVID-19 Has Been ‘Apocalyptic’ for Public Transit. Will Congress Offer More Help?

While trying to get to work over the past few months, Brittany Williams, a Seattle home care worker, has often been passed by two or three buses before one stops to let her board. Buses in her area that once carried anywhere from about 50 to 100 passengers have been limited to between 12 and 18 to prevent overcrowding in response to coronavirus, and Williams’ commute, typically a half-hour ride, now takes more than double that time. Other Seattle transit riders have described budgeting as much as an extra hour per trip to account for the reduced capacity, eating into their time at work, school or with family. Even with the ridership limits in place, Williams, 34, doesn’t feel safe on public transit. Some passengers don’t wear face coverings, and bus drivers sometimes ignore capacity limits, she says. On one ride with her seven-year-old son, she decided to get off at a stop far from her home after a driver allowed a crowd of people to board. “It’s very trying. I’ll put...

New story in Health from Time: A Montana Care Home Refused Free COVID-19 Tests. Now, Nearly Every Resident Has Coronavirus

(BILLINGS, Mont.) — It was meant to be a last line of defense to protect the most vulnerable as the coronavirus spread across the United States : Montana officials offered free testing in May for staff and residents at assisted living and long-term care facilities. But not all of them followed through, according to state data, including a facility in Billings, Montana’s largest city, that cares for people with dementia and other memory problems. The virus has infected almost every resident and killed eight, accounting for almost a quarter of Montana’s 34 confirmed deaths. Thirty-six employees also have tested positive at the facility where 59 people lived before the deaths began. Read more: ‘It’s Getting Worse.’ Nursing Home Workers Confront Risks in Facilities Devastated by Coronavirus While Montana’s rates of confirmed infections and deaths are much lower than other parts of the country, the outbreak at Canyon Creek Memory Care illustrates that even the most simple an...

New story in Health from Time: An At-Home Coronavirus Test May Be On the Way in the U.S.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in the U.S. , there’s a new urgency to make sure there are as many tests as possible to diagnose people who have symptoms that might indicate an infection. Knowing if people are positive is important for guiding their next steps: self-isolation, avoiding contact with others, and, if their symptoms get worse, seeking medical care. To date, access to tests has been spotty at best across the country, and while more kits are now available than even a week ago , most are gene-based assays that take several days for commercial labs to process and produce results. That may change in about two months if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives Emergency Use Authorization to the first blood-based COVID-19 test in the U.S. Scanwell Health, an at-home test company based in California, licensed the rights to a test developed by Chinese company Innovita, which was used extensively at the height of country’s epidemic earlier this year. “The ...

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