Sections of the media seem unable to report on any Covid-19-related news without finding within it a sure sign of impending disaster. I suppose it’s a conception of ‘responsible reporting’ (don’t tell people anything that might make them cavalier about the threat), or perhaps it’s just that bad news sells, but it is starting to feel like a parallel universe.
Take the curious phenomenon of the average age of new Covid-19 infections coming down, dramatically, across the world. This is really not bad news: obviously it would be better if no-one was getting infected, but if people are getting infected it is surely better to have younger people infected than older people, for the simple reason that they are far, far less likely to die of it. We should want the average age of new infections to be as low as possible.
You wouldn’t guess it from the coverage.
“As virus surges, young people account for ‘disturbing’ number of cases,” screamed The New York Times last week, revealing that more than half of new cases in Arizona and parts of Texas are under 44, and that the median age of new cases in Florida has plummeted from 65 in March to 35 more recently. “The dropping age of the infected is becoming one of the most pressing problems for local officials” reported Bloomberg, ominously. Not as ‘pressing’ as it would be if the average age of the infected was increasing, presumably — because then there’d be many more people getting sick and dying.
States like Florida and Arizona are seeing a genuine surge, so it is understandable that people are concerned, and it is translating into an uptick in hospitalisations and deaths. But the fact that most of these cases are among younger people is a mercy, as it should mean that these infections will translate to fewer hospitalisations and deaths than the equivalent number of cases among older people.
Sweden suffers a continual drumbeat of horror stories and horror charts showing surges in case numbers, but the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell insists that it’s entirely a function of increased testing. Once again, the age profile of these new cases is younger and younger. Every day I check the chart for new admissions into intensive care in Sweden, awaiting the real-world effects of all these new cases, but every day the trend line continues downwards. As of today there are 127 people in ICU with Covid-19 in Sweden, a country of 10 million people.
Closer to home, hidden in the very detailed report by Public Health England into the Leicester outbreak that has led to an extended lockdown in that city, is the same detail:
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