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Coronavirus: Why it’s so deadly in Italy - Andreas Backhaus - Medium
So, I had mentioned earlier in the ongoing discussions that this virus is unusually fatal to the only a specific age group. Usually these illnesses target the very young and the very old.
As such, I had said it would make sense to urge the old to self quarantine and focus our efforts of prevention on that age group.
It seems that, for whatever reason, this is how it played out in South Korea, which the majority of illnesses hitting people in their 20s, and a very low rate of illness in the elderly.
Grouping the age in ten-year-intervals and comparing the percentage shares of cases that fall into each age group reveals a striking dissimilarity between South Korea (red bars) and Italy (green bars): Recently, 3% of all confirmed cases in South Korea were at least 80 years old. At about the same time, 19.1% of all confirmed cases in Italy were at least 80 years old.
So, I had mentioned earlier in the ongoing discussions that this virus is unusually fatal to the only a specific age group. Usually these illnesses target the very young and the very old.
As such, I had said it would make sense to urge the old to self quarantine and focus our efforts of prevention on that age group.
It seems that, for whatever reason, this is how it played out in South Korea, which the majority of illnesses hitting people in their 20s, and a very low rate of illness in the elderly.