{"id":118285,"date":"2021-04-13T09:30:53","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T01:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.namnewsnetwork.org\/?p=118285"},"modified":"2021-04-13T09:30:56","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T01:30:56","slug":"covid-19-brazil-now-has-more-young-than-old-covid-patients-in-icus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/?p=118285","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19: Brazil now has more young than old Covid patients in ICUs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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BRASILIA, April 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The number of Covid-19 patients under 40 in intensive care in Brazil surpassed older groups last month, a researcher said, amid a deadly surge driven partly by a new coronavirus variant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number of people aged 39 or younger in intensive care units with Covid-19 in March rose sharply to more than 11,000, or 52.2 percent of the total, said the Brazilian ICU Project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was up from 14.6 percent of total ICU patients early in the pandemic and around 45 percent from September through February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPreviously, 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,\u201d said Dr. Ederlon Rezende, co-coordinator of the project, an initiative of the Brazilian Association of Intensive Medicine (AMIB).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said various factors could be driving the increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patients over 80, who fell from 13.6 percent to 7.8 percent of the total in Brazil\u2019s ICUs in March, are now largely vaccinated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Young people are also more likely to expose themselves to the virus, whether because they have to leave home to work or believe they are less vulnerable, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another factor may be the new Brazilian variant, known as P1, which experts say is partly responsible for the country\u2019s Covid-19 death toll exploding in March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The numbers suggest that P1, which can re-infect people who have had the original strain of the virus, may also be more virulent, Rezende said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe patients arriving in ICUs now are younger, have no pre-existing conditions and are developing more severe cases of the virus, too,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The number of ICU patients without pre-existing conditions increased by nearly a third in March, to 30.3 percent of the total.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the proportion of patients put on ventilators reached a pandemic record of 58.1 percent in March, according to the project\u2019s data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brazil registered more than 66,500 Covid-19 deaths in March, more than double the hard-hit country\u2019s previous monthly record in July 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The disease has claimed a total of 351,000 lives in the country of 212 million people, a death toll second only to that of the United States. — NNN-AGENCIES<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BRASILIA, April 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The number of Covid-19 patients under 40 in intensive care in Brazil surpassed older groups last month, a researcher said, amid a deadly surge driven partly by a new coronavirus variant. The number of people aged 39 or younger in intensive care units with Covid-19 in March rose sharply to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":118290,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[208],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118285"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/118290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}