Why are young people falling prey to coronavirus?

From the beginning of the pandemic, the coronavirus was largely seen as a death sentence for older people. But the mysterious virus has stunned and outmanoeuvred the global scientific community as the world witnesses rising death tolls among younger populations with no pre-existing health conditions.  

Now scientists are course-correcting, pointing out the dire fact that the disease can kill perfectly young and healthy human bodies.  

"I'm fascinated by what I would call the pathogenesis," said Antony Fauci, the top doctor in Washington’s anti-Covid-19 task force.

"You know, you get so many people who do well and then some people who just, bingo, they're on a respirator, they're on ECMO (a cardio-pulmonary machine) and they're dead," Fauci said, referring to the fact that both global scientific community and governments still have no clear idea about the behaviour of the virus.  

According to specific March data, which covers nearly 2,500 patients, provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately half of the patients were aged between 20 and 54 and even more worryingly 38 percent of patients within the same age range were hospitalised. 

More than 700 people under 50 have died from the virus across the US, according to a Washington Post analysis. The number corresponds to nearly 5 percent of the US total deaths to date. 

“A very fit 30-year-old triathlete is just as vulnerable as a chess-playing 45-year-old who gets no exercise. We just don’t know who it is that this virus carries the master key to,” said Shawn Evans, a medical expert and the director of resuscitation at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, California, the US. 

Scientists across the world blame several possible factors ranging from genetic makeup to the immune system and the virus load - the amount of virus - in the body of patients for the death of young people.

While some young people have appeared to be in very good shape in terms of their health, their immune system has been unable to deal with the enigmatic virus’ deadly attacks. 

“Just because they are young doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable. Nobody knows what immune protection they have at any given moment,” Evans said.  

Another problematic fact is that a powerful immune system, which overreacts to the virus could prove suicidal and destroy healthy cells inside the body of a young person, and eventually cause death.

“In some young, healthy people, a very reactive immune system could lead to a massive inflammatory storm that could overwhelm the lungs and other organs,” wrote Sanjap Gupta, a popular medical expert and author. 

“In those cases, it is not an aged or weakened immune system that is the problem -- it is one that works too well. Some frontline clinicians have speculated that is why steroids, an immune system suppressant, seem to offer benefit in some people,” Gupta advised. 

The human immune system also strongly depends on genetic makeup, which is another crucial factor to explain young deaths from the virus. 

“It is very possible that some of us could have a particular genetic makeup that makes it more likely that we will respond badly to an infection with this coronavirus,” said Michael Skinner, a virologist, working for Britain’s Imperial College, whose groundbreaking study on the virus’s possible death tolls across the world has been widely regarded as a wake-up call for some populist leaders like US President Donald Trump and recently hospitalised British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 

Experts also think that a high virus infection could also lead to serious conditions in young healthy people. 

“For Covid-19, early reports from China suggest that the viral load is higher in patients with more severe disease, which is also the case for Sars and influenza,” said Edward Parker, an academic at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. 

The virus also kills young people in a very dramatic fashion with unexpected sudden deaths.  

“When they do deteriorate, they do so much more dramatically,” Dr. Evans said. 

Overall, experts are not shy to express their cluelessness about the undetectable behaviour of the virus, killing young and old, rich and poor and healthy and compromised. 

"I mean, the dichotomy between that, there's something there ... that we're missing from a pathogenesis standpoint. And I don't think it's only if you're elderly or if you have underlying conditions,” Fauci, the leading medic in the US, observed.

But he is also hopeful. 

“There's something else going on there that hopefully we'll ultimately figure out."