Coronavirus impacts people of all ages, but it can have a different effect on each age group. The UK’s mass vaccination rollout has begun and is being distributed based on age and one’s need or vulnerability. Express.co.uk has examined the latest report from the Zoe Covid Study app to discover how widespread symptomatic Covid-19 is per age group according to the latest data.
All of the UK is currently under some form of lockdown as coronavirus continues to rage across the regions.
There are more people of all ages in hospitals with Covid now than during the first lockdown in spring 2020.
Infections have been the highest in teenagers, students and people in their 20s and 30s in recent months.
A small number of these groups inevitably end up in hospital needing treatment.
Throughout the pandemic, generally-speaking, the older someone is, the greater their risk from coronavirus.
This fact is particularly true for those aged 65 and above.
For anyone aged under 40, their risk of death was estimated to be about 0.1 percent according to research from Imperial College London during the first wave.
However, the new UK Covid variant is proving to be more deadly than the original virus which is affecting all age groups.
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Public Health England, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Exeter have each been trying to assess how deadly the new variant is.
Their evidence has been assessed by scientists on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).
The group concluded there was a “realistic possibility” that the virus had become more deadly, but this is far from certain.
The Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance suggested the data is “not yet strong”.
He said: “I want to stress that there’s a lot of uncertainty around these numbers and we need more work to get a precise handle on it, but it obviously is a concern that this has an increase in mortality as well as an increase in transmissibility.”
Previous work suggests the new variant spreads between 30 percent and 70 percent faster than others, and there are hints it is about 30 percent more deadly.
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In total, there have been 87,726 deaths involving Covid-19 registered in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic (up to January 8, 2021) according to the latest Office for National Statistics data.
Around 75 percent of these have occurred among people aged 75 years and over.
Young people and those on the lowest incomes were as likely to be impacted in this second phase, during November, as they were in the first lockdown.
There was a six-fold increase in those aged under 30 years reporting that they had been furloughed, from 2.1 percent for the four days to November 1 to 12.3 percent for the period of November 4 to 8).
According to the Zoe Covid Study app, symptomatic coronavirus cases by age per 100,000 people is as follows:
- Age 0 to nine: 428
- Age 10 to 19: 577
- Age 20 to 29: 1,881
- Age 30 to 39: 1,532
- Age 40 to 49: 1,162
- Age 50 to 59: 904
- Age 60 to 69: 422
- Age 70 to 79: 209
- Age 80 to 89: 255.
- Total: 919 symptomatic Covid cases per 100,000 people.
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According to recent ONS data, an estimated 5.4 million people in England would have tested positive for the Covid-19 antibodies in December 2020.
This figure suggests around one in eight people (12.1 percent of the population) aged 16 and over would have previously been infected.
Elsewhere in the UK, 9.8 percent in Wales, 7.8 percent in Northern Ireland and 8.9 percent in Scotland would likely have tested positive for the coronavirus antibodies.
