A new study has found that nearly all patients who were hospitalized in New York due to the coronavirus had underlying health conditions. According to the study, 94% of patients had an underlying health issue.
The average patient admitted to the hospital was 63 years old. Fifty-three percent of all coronavirus patients suffered from hypertension (high blood pressure), 42% suffered from obesity and 32% had diabetes.
Additionally, while only 12% of those admitted to hospitals in New York had either “none” or “one” comorbidity, 88% of those hospitalized had “more than one” comorbidity.
Karina Davidson, one of the study’s authors and senior vice president for the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, told Time Magazine, “Having serious comorbidities increases your risk.”
The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
This study from New York corresponds with similar data taken from Italy. A study conducted by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Italy’s leading technical-scientific body of the Italian National Health Service, found that the average age of an Italian dying from COVID-19 was 78.5.
Additionally, the ISS study found that in Italy, 23.5% of those who died from COVID-19 had “one” comorbidity, 26.6% had “two,” and 48.6% who died had “3 comorbidities or more.” Combined, this means that 99% of Italians who have died from the coronavirus had other illnesses. The most common comorbidities included hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and atrial fibrillation.
Intriguingly, numerous reports are now surfacing that far more people may have already have the coronavirus in the United States than was originally thought. If true, this means that the death rate due to coronavirus, as a percentage of those who have had it, is far lower than official reports indicate.
According to official testing data, 263,460 New Yorkers have tested positive for COVID-19 out of 695,920 total tests done, as of writing.
Yet on April 23, New York released the results of an antibody study conducted by the state which found that 13.9% of the population of New York has been infected with the coronavirus at some point. This equates to around 2.7 million people, which is around 10 times the number of cases officially confirmed through testing. In New York City, 21% of the population is estimated to have had the coronavirus based on the antibody study.
According to The Hill, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., said on Thursday that these people with the COVID-19 antibodies “were infected three weeks ago, four weeks ago, five weeks ago, six weeks ago. But they had the virus, they developed the antibodies and they are now recovered.”
Human beings’ immune systems produce antibodies, a blood protein, to counter and fight foreign invaders to the body like bacteria and viruses. When someone contracts a virus, even if they are asymptomatic and never tested for the disease, their body will produce antibodies to fight the infection.
For one doctor, this new data means that it is now time to end the quarantines and lockdowns. “The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19,” wrote Scott W. Atlas, MD, the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, in an op-ed for The Hill. “Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter,” he wrote.
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Photo from Samaritan’s Purse
