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COVID sends more and more young people to intensive care

After ten days of coma, Miguel Velandia woke up, intubated, in a hospital in Bogota. He almost died for believing, like many young people, that the new coronavirus only kills the old.

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At 31, he felt invulnerable. Leading a healthy life, suffering from “no” illness and being “very meticulous about cleanliness”.

He was however contaminated, apparently at the market, without mask. He stayed almost a month between life and death at the El Tunal public hospital in the south of the Colombian capital.

This bookkeeper is in the age group (20/39 years) which has the most cases of Covid-19 in Colombia, about 45% of a total of more than 97,000, including more than 3,300 dead, according to official statistics.

With 30% of cases, Bogota is the epicenter.

In this capital of eight million inhabitants, 14% of the 146 intensive care patients are between 20 and 39 years old. But this rate would actually be much higher because the probable cases are three times more numerous than the confirmed ones.

And although their mortality rate is low (5%) compared to people aged 60 to 99 (almost 73%), more and more young people are hospitalized in the intensive care unit (ICU).

The occupancy rate of Bogota’s ICUs continues to rise and already exceeds 73%. In several of them, there are young people like Miguel, when they should in theory have patients considered more vulnerable because of their age or pre-existing ills.

“I did not pay attention, but it is the young people who fall ill,” he laments in his modest room, where he remained isolated ten days after his discharge from the hospital on June 15.

Since then, analyzes have shown that he was free of the virus. There are after-effects. Crutches are leaning against his bed.

Miguel suffers from drooping foot disorder, which prevents him from lifting the lower left end. Doctors do not know if “the foot has lost memory” as a result of the virus and whether it will be able to walk normally again.

When he was in an artificial coma, the psychologist made this only son listen to messages of affection from his relatives. He didn’t know until after he woke up. And there, the doctors diagnosed a new respiratory problem. We had to drain a lung. He still remembers the pain.

“This illness has delayed all my projects … or has ruined them,” regrets this young man who, before the pandemic, had left his job with an optician to work freelance.

John Parra, head of the ICU where Miguel had arrived breathing with difficulty, sees more and more “people of productive age” connected to a respirator since the containment of the population, decreed 100 days ago, is eased .

“There is nothing safe with this disease and we see that more young people get sick because they are the ones who go out the most,” said the 38-year-old doctor.

Her first patient who died of the virus was a 33-year-old colleague, a specialist with no “medical history”. “He was admitted during my custody and I told him that everything would be fine (…) He struggled for twelve days.”

Doctors and experts denounce the message sent to young people at the start of the pandemic, when the government decreed a very strict confinement of the over 70s, extended until the end of August. And, although cases and deaths continue to grow, more and more activities are resuming to revive the economy.

“The older adults stayed at home, took their precautions. And what did the young people do? They came out, exposed themselves more and now we can see the effects, ”laments Fernanda Castañeda, 30, head of the ICU nurses at El Tunal.

However, the return to general confinement does not seem possible. “The young people have decided to go out, they are no longer afraid of contaminating themselves. It is a global and irreversible phenomenon, ”tweeted the former Minister of Health, Alejandro Gaviria.

In the noise of the ICU machines, the nurse fights against anxiety: “the last who died was 38 years old. It affected us a lot. ” In front of the hospital, families send messages or videos to their loved ones in a coma.

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