In London, Ont., 31-year-old Alex Kopacz, a gold-medal Olympic brakeman in men’s bobsled, spent four days in hospital with COVID after a business trip to Calgary. He doesn’t know his ground zero — Calgary or Toronto’s Pearson Airport. But “this whole thing has been a terrible experience, period. In the hospital, awful. I said goodbye to many people,” he said in an interview with theon Thursday. “I’m grateful I’m alive, I’m grateful I can breathe.” He’s home now, but he’s tired.
Some people are dying at home. They stay at home, self-isolate and die, without having called the ambulance, some from silent hypoxia, a baffling condition that causes abnormally and dangerously low levels of oxygen, without people realizing just how sick they are.Article content But in waves one and two, the people getting sick and dying were predominantly much older, with multiple underlying health problems. A population that’s now been immunized. “We’ve taken the elderly, the above 80’s and, to a large extent, the above 70’s, our most vulnerable patients, out of play,” Warshawsky said. “We vaccinated them, they’re no longer at risk of the disease, which is amazing, and it’s a great accomplishment.
Still, the increase in younger adults can’t be fully explained by having vaccinated older generations. The fact that older people are vaccinated doesn’t inherently make younger people more vulnerable, Downar said. “There is clearly something different about this wave.”Article contenttap here to see other videos from our teamMany believe variants are driving the “younger and sicker” code blue. Nearly 95,000 confirmed cases of “variants of concern” have been reported across Canada, with the B.1.1.
There is evidence the variants deliver a higher dose of virus when they do infect, and the amount of virus a person is exposed to might affect how sick he or she gets. The variants are also exhibiting some immune evasion. The mutations make the spike protein that adorns the virus stickier, and better able to gum to receptors lining the human respiratory tract.
Children can spread the virus, but they aren’t the main drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. “It’s workplace exposure that’s driving most of these infections, not children getting it at school and bringing it home to their parents.” And while there have been heart-wrenching deaths in young children — a 13-year-old Brampton girl, an infant and toddler in B.C., a 17-year-old Alberta teen — COVID-19 is still a mild illness in the vast majority of children. The zero to 19 age group accounts for 1.
And yet almost 90% of Ontario COVID19 deaths since mid March have been in the 60+ age group.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: globeandmail - 🏆 5. / 92 Read more »
Source: VancouverSun - 🏆 49. / 61 Read more »
Source: VancouverSun - 🏆 49. / 61 Read more »
Source: Sportsnet - 🏆 57. / 59 Read more »
Source: nationalpost - 🏆 10. / 80 Read more »