Message: The Young and Healthy Are at Risk from COVID-19
Tracing the launch and deployment of a U.S.-based narrative that became part of The New York City Pandemic Show script
Page subject to ongoing revision/updates.
Related X thread, posted 15 September 2024.
Federal Proclamation
March 16, 2020
The U.S. Federal Government issues 15 Days to Slow the Spread proclamation. The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America say, “Even if you are young, or otherwise healthy, you are at risk and your activities can increase the risk for others.”
WHO Director-General says at a media briefing, “This is a serious disease. Although the evidence we have suggests that those over 60 are at highest risk, young people, including children, have died.”
Healthcare Worker Voices
March 20, 2020
Wall Street Journal: “At the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, several coronavirus patients under 40, including a few in their 20s, were on ventilators in the intensive-care unit as of Thursday. All were healthy before getting the virus, said Dr. Narasimhan.” | Also posted on Twitter by Pfizer Board member and former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb
March 23, 2020
Risa Budoff (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center): “The emergency room gets busier every day. I feel it, the nurses feel it, the techs feel it. There’s a scary energy that continues to grow. I’ve seen multiple elderly people being Intubated daily since last week, and the scary part is that we’re starting to see younger people decompensate, also requiring intubation (a tube to breathe for you).”
March 24, 2020
Celine Gounder (Bellevue Hospital): “[The patients] were younger than you might expect. They range from late twenties to late seventies but the median age was late forties so, you know, basically my age, about two thirds of them were men.” 1
March 25, 2020
Craig Spencer (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center)): "We are seeing everyone from every age group…Some of my sicker patients have been in their 30s and 40s. Some of the people we've been putting on a breathing tube are my same age." | Retrospectively (3/30/24): “The past is being rewritten But none of us who witnessed those early days can scrub our memories of the pain, and horror We’ll never forget finding young, otherwise healthy people dead in a chair.”
Colleen Smith (Elmhurst): “Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities. They’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.”
March 26, 2020
Sotirios Kassapidis (Mount Sinai/Northwell) “…and they’re all ages. Don’t delude yourself into thinking only the old will die. They’re all ages.” | Next day: "We've had patients from 30 to 80. No underlying conditions. If they have underlying conditions, that's a strike against them."
Peter Shearer (Mount Sinai Brooklyn): “At the current moment I have 135 COVID-positive patients. There are probably another 10 or 15 that just don’t have test results back yet. And they are sick. They are the ones who need to be admitted to the hospital. It’s a few debilitated elderly from nursing homes, but there’s a lot of patients who are between the ages of 40 to 60 who may have some underlying health problems like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, and their lungs are very inflamed. They go from being moderately sick to crashing and needing to put on ventilators very quickly.”
March 29, 2020
Dr. Mangala Narasimhan (Northwell) “I think there's a misperception out there that this is targeting older people with a lot of medical problems that is not what we are seeing in our hospitals. Our hospitals have an average age of 60, and I have many 20, 30, 40 year-olds -- many of them very, very sick on ventilators with no medical problems. So the majority of them are younger people with a few or no medical problems. So the misperception of this can't hurt me because I'm young, I think, is a dangerous one.”
Dr. Cornelia Griggs (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center): “My babies are too young to read this now. And they’d barely recognize me in my fear. But if they lose me to COVID I want them to know Mommy tried really hard to do her job. #GetMePPE #NYC” [Author: The Sky Was Falling]
April 9, 2020
Michelle Pfeffer (EMT): “I’ve seen a lot of young people who are infected, one of which was our own member. She was 34 years old. I actually went through the EMS Academy with her, as well as paramedic school. She went home one day, collapsed, and ending up getting admitted into the hospital and did end up having to be intubated and in the ICU.”
April 12, 2020
Mollie James (Travel Doctor from Iowa, Flushing Hospital): “We’re trying all these treatments, and we’re not making a huge difference. And I think there’s the impression that this is all older patients who have lots of medical issues, and there is some of that. But there’s also 20 and 30 and 40 year olds who are healthy, who are coming in and dying of COVID.”
April 21, 2020
Sam Parina (NYU Lagone): “But we have plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who are on ventilators with no real significant past medical history as well. So that’s just one element where the data is quite different [from Wuhan, Spain, and Italy].”
April/May 2020
(Travel Doctor from UW-Madison, Beth Israel): Speaking retrospectively - July 1, 2020 (with Paul Mayo): “The severity, morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 must be re-emphasized to all, both young and old, as it spares neither.” ~ January 26, 2024: “There was no common theme. In fact, most of my memory is not of the elderly. Maybe the elderly died before they could get to the hospital. Most of them – I just remember 40s, 50s, 60s—even a couple of 30, people in their 30s.” | “They were coming to the hospital – I don’t necessarily know where they were–not necessarily nursing homes. I mean, I had patients...many non nursing home patients. I just remember a lot of fathers, 48 to 52 on vents.”May 15, 2020
Eric Burnett (NYP Columbia): “My heart sank as I scrolled the seemingly endless list of patients. Mr. X died 8 days ago. Alone, in an ICU bed, connected to a ventilator. The 36-year-old father of two with no medical conditions: deceased.”
Johanna Miele (Manager, Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience, NYU Langone Health): “One day, I was working in the morgue, and I saw that one of the decedents had the same birth-year as me. I am 32; that early in the pandemic, we weren’t expecting a 32-year-old to die. We thought we’d primarily be seeing older people. That person was in the morgue for a very long time because the family was completely unprepared to lose such a young family member. There were so many unexpected deaths, and the funeral home industry became completely backlogged.”
Stories of Younger-Adult Deaths (NYC)
March 17, 2020: Juan Sanabria (52)
April 25, 2020: Young and Middle-Aged People, Barely Sick with COVID-19, are Dying of Strokes
Data
New York City appears to be domestic & global outlier in the number of younger-adult deaths & younger-adult COVID-19 deaths in spring 2020.
Death Certificate Guidance
Vital Statistics Reporting Guidance published in April 2020 by HHS and related agencies gave two (of four) death certificate coding examples involving decedents under age 50:
a 34-year-old female with no significant past medical history, and
a 48-year-old male with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19.
This is a great project. You are highlighting many anecdotes or statistics that don't make sense to many of us. For example ...
May 15, 2020 ..
Eric Burnett (NYP Columbia): “My heart sank as I scrolled the seemingly endless list of patients. Mr. X died 8 days ago. Alone, in an ICU bed, connected to a ventilator. The 36 year old father of two with no medical conditions: deceased.”
My Comment: So Mr. Burnett died on May 7, 2020. As, on average, it takes 17 to 19 days to be infected and then die from Covid, it seems clear that Mr. Burnett was infected with this virus some time in mid to late April 2020. This was well after the lockdowns had been imposed and the media coverage had been non-stop Covid, promoting all the NPIs.
Still, he allegedly "caught" Covid anyway - in the middle of the Spring well after typical ILI outbreaks had come and gone.
The Official take-away or Narrative: People were suddenly catching Covid ... in the Spring. Also, people apparently had not been catching this virus earlier in the cold and flu weeks and months (and thus developing natural immunity). Nobody was dying from a new virus in, say, January or February 2020.
And for some reason this huge spike of deaths only happens in New York City.
... Also, note that Mr. Burnett "died alone" on that ventilator in that ICU. His family or people who cared the most about him were not allowed to be with him or check on him themselves. That was a big change in medical protocols.
Nobody should "die alone."
A bit of context: the CDC's "Guidance for Certifying Deaths Due to Coronavirus Disease 2019" document has, as one of the four example scenarios for reporting cause of death, a 34-year-old woman "with no significant past medical history" who goes to the hospital with acute respiratory distress syndrome, goes to the ICU and gets put on a ventilator, and soon dies. So, the CDC guidance helped put this scenario of a healthy, younger adult simply dying from covid in the minds of doctors.
The document is at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf