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Severity of Covid-19 strongly correlated with age, study finds

Orange with Media Services, published on Tuesday March 31, 2020 at 8:36 p.m.

British study confirms increased mortality by age of infected patients.

It is the British medical journal The Lancet which exposes this new data, issued from a study of several hundred Chinese cases of Covid-19, gathered since February 2020. This work shows that the disease is on average much more formidable for those over 60 years of age with a mortality rate of 6.4% (among confirmed cases).

The mortality rate even climbs to 13.4% for those over 80 years old against 0.32% of deaths only for those under 60 years old. However, the mortality rates calculated in this study are significantly lower than those of previous estimates, which placed the average proportion of deaths (among confirmed cases) at more than 2%.

For example, a large analysis published on February 24 by Chinese researchers in the American medical journal Jama estimated the average death rate at 2.3%.

The Lancet study, conducted by researchers from Imperial College, Queen Mary University in London and the University of Oxford, highlights that the proportion of patients requiring hospitalization (which accounts for the severity of condition of infected people) increases sharply with age.

8% of people in their 50s hospitalized

The percentage of Covid-19 patients requiring hospitalization is only 0.04% for 10/19 year olds, 1% for 20/29 year olds, 3.4% for 30/39 and 4, 3% for 40/49 year olds.

Next, the hospitalization rate doubles to 8.2% for 50/59 year olds, then climbs to 11.8% for 60/69 year olds, 16.6% for 70/79 year olds and peaks at 18.4 % for those aged 80 and over.

The latter figure means that about one in five octogenarians develops a form serious enough to require hospitalization.

Declared in December in the Chinese city of Wuhan (center), the epidemic of new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has caused the death of nearly 40,000 people in approximately 800,000 confirmed cases worldwide.

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