A significant portion of the younger population in Guyana has contracted the novel coronavirus, according to Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony.
During today’s Covid-19 update, he revealed that more than 4000 of the 11,527 positive cases recorded to date were of young people.
“Infections have always been higher in the younger population so when you review the data that we’ve had of the 11,000 cases we’ve had … the 20 to 25 age group, we’ve had in excess of 1,500 infections. The 25 to 30 age groups, we’ve had more than 1,600 infections. The 30 to 35 age group, again, that would have been about 1,200 infections,” Dr Anthony said.
According to the Minister, this trend is due to the increased activity by younger persons – most of whom develop a milder form of the infection.
“These are the ones going out very often,” he posited.
Many young persons have recovered from the virus within 10 days, without the need for hospitalisation. However, this has somewhat changed within recent weeks.
“Our challenge over the last couple of weeks is that we’ve seen a few cases where younger people are coming into the hospital. We’ve started analyzing those cases and we’ve also seen relatively younger persons, between 40 and so forth, who would have had some form of comorbidities… and then died from Covid. So this is a worrying trend,” the Health Minister said.
The Covid-19 vaccines are now available to the entire adult population, that is persons 18 years and older.
