The number of COVID-19 patients under 40 in intensive care in Brazil surpassed older groups last month, a researcher said on Sunday, amid a deadly surge driven partly by a new variant.
The number of people aged 39 or younger in intensive care units (ICUs) with COVID-19 last month rose sharply to more than 11,000, or 52.2 percent of the total, the Brazilian ICU Project said.
That was up from 14.6 percent of total ICU patients early in the pandemic and about 45 percent from September last year through February.
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“Previously, this was a population that would typically only develop a less-severe form of the disease and would not need intensive care. So the increase for this age group is very significant,” said Ederlon Rezende, co-coordinator of the project, an initiative of the Brazilian Association of Intensive Medicine.
He said various factors could be driving the increase.
Patients over 80, who fell from 13.6 percent to 7.8 percent of the total in Brazil’s ICUs last month, are now largely vaccinated.
Young people are also more likely to expose themselves to the coronavirus, whether because they have to leave home to work or believe they are less vulnerable, he added.
MORE VIRULENT
Another factor might be the new Brazilian variant, known as P1, which experts say is partly responsible for the nation’s COVID-19 death toll exploding last month.
The numbers suggest that P1, which can reinfect people who have had the original strain of the coronavirus, might also be more virulent, Rezende said.
“The patients arriving in ICUs now are younger, have no pre-existing conditions and are developing more severe cases of the virus, too,” he said.
The number of ICU patients without pre-existing conditions increased by nearly one-third last month, to 30.3 percent of the total, while the proportion of patients put on ventilators reached a pandemic record of 58.1 percent, the project’s data showed.
Brazil registered more than 66,500 COVID-19 deaths last month, more than double the hard-hit nation’s previous monthly record in July last year.
The disease has claimed 353,137 lives in the nation of 212 million people, a death toll second only to that of the US.
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