Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany
Increasingly, you can hear that the dead from the coronavirus already had so little to live. But scientists have found that this is not so. Even older people with concomitant serious illnesses could live a few more years. Young people die from covid-19, and those who survive may face consequences.
Coronavirus outbreak
The coronavirus dead already had a short time to live? Studies show how wrong this assumption is: men lose an average of thirteen years of life, women – eight
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It sounds adamant: the dying of the coronavirus did not have to live long, either because of old age or various serious concomitant diseases. Recently, the mayor of Tubingen, Boris Palmer, addressed this issue. He said that with general restrictions, “perhaps they save people who would die six months later.” He later apologized for his words. But others, such as forensic doctor Klaus Püschel from Hamburg, again and again point to chronic diseases of coronavirus victims.
Scientists from the University of Glasgow, together with the country’s health department, tested this assumption in their study – and came to completely different conclusions. As it turned out, male victims of coronavirus could live an average of thirteen years longer, and women eight. In this case, the effect of diseases that were already present in the victims before infection with coronavirus was studied in detail.
Even the elderly or people with chronic diseases, according to Scottish scientists, most often could have lived for many more years if they had not been infected with coronavirus.
And young healthy people die from the effects of infection
Scientists also compared WHO’s overall life expectancy for different age groups with data on deaths among coronavirus infected in Italy. To get an accurate picture of how previous illnesses affect life expectancy, Scottish scientists also included in their study current data on coronavirus infections in the UK.
At the same time, the researchers in their calculations focused on patients with diseases of the cardiovascular system, for example, cardiac arrhythmias or heart failure, as well as patients with stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, liver failure, and kidney diseases .
Italian data on mortality from coronavirus have shown that a history of hypertension is especially prevalent there. 73% of all deceased suffered from high blood pressure. In second place are diabetes (31.3%) and cardiovascular diseases (27.8%).
The authors of the study also noted that the chances of survival depend on other factors, for example, the level of medical support in different regions. It is in relation to Italy that there is a suspicion that mortality there is high, including because not all patients have received proper treatment. There are no data on whether coronavirus victims were smokers and were overweight.
The average age of coronavirus victims, according to the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, is 81 years. In a Scottish study, the numbers are similar. But, despite the advanced age of many who died from coronavirus, scientists warn against hasty conclusions. On the one hand, younger and healthier people die from the virus. On the other hand, existing chronic diseases do not automatically mean early death.
“It is often said that infection with coronavirus can cost a person one or two years of life, but usually the situation is more serious,” the researchers conclude. The older the patient and the more chronic diseases he has, the lower this figure. But an 80-year-old man in good shape, on average, loses eleven years of life due to coronavirus.
InoSMI materials contain estimates of exclusively foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
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