WHO says COVID-19 soaring among younger people with long-term symptoms

COVID-19 infections are soaring in younger people across the globe who are “letting down their guard”, WHO officials said at a live-streamed conference. While the risk of death of younger ones infected is low, they may suffer from long-term symptoms even after they recover, the health organization added.  “We have said it before and we will say it again, young people are not invincible,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

“Young people can be infected, young people can die and young people can transmit the virus to others,” Tedros said, adding, it was a challenge to convince the younger population that COVID-19 could pose serious health risks among those below 50. Meanwhile, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said that even people who have mild disease that go on to recover just fine have longer-term effects of the illness, the WHO just recently started to learn about this.  

Speaking about the residual symptoms in the younger population, Kerkhove warned that some suffer from extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, or difficulty resuming normal activities like going back to work or the gym long after they recover. “We are learning what that means,” she said. Further, she encouraged healthy practices such as washing hands, social distancing, wearing a mask, and avoiding crowded spots. “We are consistently seeing night clubs as amplifiers of transmission,” Kerkhove said at the COVID-19 briefing. “This is very unfortunate because know that young people want to resume normal activities. But there are situations where the virus if it’s present, can take hold and transmit efficiently,” she added.  

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Worrying trend is emerging

Recently, Public health experts and the CDC in the US warned that younger people were noted to drive the recent COVID-19 surge. Georgia State University School of Public Health professor Colin Smith reportedly said that hospitals were seeing the number of individuals infected shifting from older populations to younger people at this point. A worrying trend is emerging in several regions with a significant increase of COVID-19 among teens and young adults, several US states reported. Thomas Tsai, MD, a surgeon and health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston was reported saying that while younger carriers will likely initially cause the death rate to fall, the pandemic is expected to get even worse this fall. 

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