Tenerife
Currently, in the Canary Islands, one in four Covid patients in Intensive Care (ICU) is under 40 years old, admittedly these patients are not the ones with the greatest chance of dying, but they are the ones who are spending the longest time in ICU due to their low morbidity.
Furthermore, 83% of those patients have no previous pathology, something that decisively prevents their probability of dying (only 27% of the cases in the last 15 days died without any pathology), but which, in turn, makes them the patients that can cause a longer saturation of these units.
This is because even though they may have a negative PCR test whilst in ICU, their illness and the consequences left by the virus are of such a calibre, that they continue to require intensive care and assisted respiration for at least three weeks or a month afterwards, due to lung damage caused by the coronavirus.
Also, being young does not provide any advantage in ICUs. "With these patients, we have to follow the same care model as for the older ones," says Ismael Molina, section chief of the Intensive Care Unit of the Hospital Universitario Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria in Tenerife, the hospital most affected by the fifth wave of the virus in the Canary Islands.
This means that these patients also require mechanical ventilation in a prolonged prone position (that is, lying face down), a very invasive technique. Before becoming infected, most of these young people were healthy and without any associated pathologies, but they do have one condition in common: obesity.
“Obesity seems to be the most determining risk factor for these age groups, but it is not known why”, says Molina, who insists that in the ICU at the Hospital de La Candelaria approximately “90% of the young people who have entered are overweight”. This circumstance is also being repeated in other hospitals in Spain and there are several international studies that suggest that obesity plays a determining role in the development of a serious illness due to Covid-19.
With the arrival of vaccines and the huge wave of infections that has especially affected young people who weren’t vaccinated, the profile of the person who ends up seriously admitted to the ICU has changed and has become much younger. Now, compared to previous waves, when the most affected were people over 60 years of age accounting for 62.6% of occupancy, according to data from the Ministry of Health, now they represent 39.5% of the cases in the ICU in the Canary Islands, meaning that those under 60 years of age represent 60% of the cases in ICU.
According to data from the Ministry of Health, the virus is also opportunistic, and during this fifth wave, it has attacked the weakest members of the population, either those who still do not have protection from a vaccine or those who are more vulnerable due to their age or previous pathologies.
In fact, and with respect to the cases found in the last two weeks, it can be seen that the number of previous pathologies is higher in the older age groups, in such a way that 43.17% of those over 80 years of age infected with coronavirus had one, two, three or more previous pathologies. This percentage drops to 37.7% in the age group from 70 to 79 years and to 24.22% in the age group 60 to 69 years.
Regarding the cases in the general population, of the 18,108 that were verified during those two weeks, 61.5% occurred in unvaccinated people and 21% in people with only one jab, which means that 82.5% had no protection against the coronavirus.
