This is a useful document-- Download Coronavirus (COVID-19) Communicating Risks to College Students BRCT (1)--prepared by Dr. Erik Rifkin (an environmental scientist specializing in human health and ecological risks) and Dr. Andrew Lazris (a primary care physician). (The document is also available on their website.) An excerpt:
CDC data, as of April 24th , shows a total of 22 young adults age 15-24 died of COVID-19 in the US. The CDC does not supply accurate data on how many people in this age group test positive, but we can use other data to estimate that number.* We know through studies and observations in such places as enclosed Navy ships that about 60% of younger people are either asymptomatic and many more have minimal symptoms, and thus most young people even with COVID-19 would likely not pursue testing. Hence, our conservative calculations of disease incidence in young adults likely over-estimate the death rate.
It should be noted that during this year, while 22 young adults in this age group died of COVID-19, 39 died from influenza and 120 died of pneumonia both unrelated to COVID-19. Among children less than 18, 3 died of COVID-19 and 78 from Influenza, showing that the likelihood of death from COVID-19 is minimal at younger ages, even below that of influenza....
It is also illustrative to compare this year’s flu and COVID-19 death rates to that of an infection that occurred only three years ago and was lethal to young adults - the 2017 influenza outbreak. During that flu season, ~ 60,000 Americans died of influenza. In the age group, 18-49 (some of whom were college students, although it is difficult to know how many), 80,000 people were hospitalized and 3,000 people died; in younger kids, age 5-17, 20,000 were hospitalized and 528 died. The absolute death rate from the 2017 influenza outbreak far exceeded that of COVID-19 in young kids and adults. An estimate of the total influenza deaths in age group 15-24 using the same methods as we used in the COVID-19 calculation would be 783 deaths in the year 2017 from influenza, far higher than the number of deaths from either COVID-19 (22) or influenza (39) this year.
One complicating factor, of course, is that since colleges shut down in March (and they don't shut down for influenza in other years), we don't know how colleges being open during peak transmission time would change these figures. But it is still useful to have a comparison between COVID and influenza for the college-age populations.
(Thanks to the historian Anthony Grafton [Princeton] for forwarding this document to me, and to Drs. Rifkin and Lazris for permission to share it.)
