4 ms·
Do 29 year old doctors typically die from the flu?
by platz 7y ago
Do 29 year old doctors typically die from the flu?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoYes. Old and very young people are typically more susceptible, but 29 year olds can die from even the seasonal flu, and the potential that young people can be atypically susceptible to a pandemic is well-known.
- jacquesm 7y agoTypically not. But that's not how this stuff works. It is bell curves all the way. So your old, very young and vulnerable people will make up the bulk of those that die but there will be plenty of regular people in the prime of their life that will die as well.
- blub 7y agoAny idea why the fatality < 9yo was zero? Surprisingly I haven't seen anyone concerned about kids, which is a tad unusual.
- tomohawk 7y agoThe 1918 flu particularly affected 20-40 year old healthy people. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-did-1918-flu-kill-so-many-otherwise-healthy-young-adults-180967178/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-did-1918-flu-kill...
- jacquesm 7y agoThat was an anomaly in many other ways too. Keep in mind that a good chunk of the world was still recovering from WWI. Being exposed to some other disease earlier in life can give a similar effect to vaccination. This is one of the reasons why HIV spread was not as bad as it could have been in Western Europe where exposure to a disease still gave some benefits many centuries later: https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050307/full/news050307-15.html https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050307/full/news050307-15.h...
- csomar 7y agoHealthy 29 year olds die, regularly, everyday. They are just less likely, though.
- DanBC 7y agoHealth care professionals will tend to be vaccinated against flu, so they are less likely to get it, so you'd be looking at a very small population which is why you don't see more deaths. If we widen this slightly to healthy but unvaccinated 29 year olds we do start to see deaths from flu.