Could the striking severity of their disease—twenty- and thirty-year-olds with covid-19 generally experience a self-limited, flu-like illness—be correlated with the amount of virus to which they were initially exposed? At least two E.R. doctors in the United States, both on the front lines of the pandemic, have also fallen critically ill; one of them, in Washington State, is only in his forties. To go by available data from Wuhan and Italy, health-care workers don’t necessarily have a higher fatality rate, but do they suffer, disproportionately, from the most severe forms of the disease? “We know the high mortality in older people,” Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease specialist and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. “But, for reasons that we don’t understand, front-line health-care workers are at great risk for serious illness despite their younger age.”
In a 2004 study of the coronavirus that causes SARS, a team from Hong Kong found that greater exposure to the virus was correlated with a more severe illness. Could the same be true of COVID-19? https://t.co/77xYEadwlm
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) March 26, 2020