COVID’s third wave is younger and sicker. Here’s everything we know about why

Nearly as many under-50s died from COVID-19 in Ontario intensive care units in the first 48 days of this now cresting third wave as in the entire September to February wave.

In London, Ont., 31-year-old Alex Kopacz, a gold-medal Olympic brakeman in men’s bobsled, spent four days in hospital with COVID after a business trip to Calgary.

In the first wave, it took 10 to 14 days after symptoms started to reach that point, a week or so of feeling unwell, of “grumbling along,” mostly staying at home, until people became short of breath and ended up in emergency or straight to the ICU, said Dr.

They stay at home, self-isolate and die, without having called the ambulance, some from silent hypoxia, a baffling condition that causes dangerously low levels of oxygen, without people realizing just how sick they are.

“The bulk of the ICU cases are still people in their 50s and 60s, but the ones that are standing out in everyone’s attention are the ones in their 40s and into their 30s,” Downar said.

Many of those coming to emergency are essential workers or racialized populations who don’t have work-from-home options, people living in multi-generational homes or cramped student housing.

But in waves one and two, the people getting sick and dying were predominantly much older, with multiple underlying health problems — a population that’s now been at least partially immunized.

People are staying in intensive care longer, and the number being intubated and attached to a ventilator is increasing.

The fact that older people are vaccinated doesn’t inherently make younger people more vulnerable, Downar said.

According to the province’s science table, the mutants carry a 63 per cent higher risk of being hospitalized, a 103 per cent increased risk of needing intensive care and a 56 per cent increased risk of dying compared to other incarnations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The P.1 variant that first emerged in Brazil’s Amazonas state, and is now spreading in Canada, has been linked with a dramatic jump in the number of 20-to-59-year-old Brazilians admitted to intensive care for ventilation, “as well as increased mortality in this age group during the second wave,” researchers reported in the European Journal of Epidemiology.

There is evidence the variants deliver a higher virus dose when they do infect, and the amount of virus a person is exposed to might affect how sick he or she gets.

In Ontario, as of the week ending April 25, 32 people under age 50 had died in an ICU with COVID-19 since the start of the third wave in March.

“They get short of breath doing activities that they wouldn’t have even thought twice about before,” Warshawsky said.

The daily wave of pregnant women coming into Ontario’s ICU’s is also alarming.

“It’s workplace exposure that’s driving most of these infections, not children getting it at school and bringing it home to their parents.” And while there have been heart-wrenching deaths in young children — a 13-year-old Brampton girl, an infant and toddler in B.C., a 17-year-old Alberta teen — COVID-19 is still a mild illness in the vast majority of children.

While the hospital has seen an uptick in admissions in the third wave, driven by high rates of infection in the community, “I don’t think we’ve seen more severe illness over the course of the year,” Friedman said.

In the end, there are sometimes no rational explanations for why some end up critically sick with COVID.

“But then we have a lot of people who either have no co-morbidities or just the usual things that so many people in that age group have, and why did they end up in the ICU? They were really unlucky.

But we’ve been very lucky; we’ve been able to handle it.” He’s watching what’s happening in Toronto, “and we’re terrified.

I don’t know if I have other small ones elsewhere,” said Kopacz, who spent four hours in hospital Thursday waiting for scans.

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