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Although older people are at greater risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19, the virus is killing young Americans in record numbers.
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Between March 1 and July 31, 12,000 more Americans between the ages of 25 and 44 died than would normally be expected. About 40% of these deaths were directly due to COVID-19.
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Two families whose 21-year-old children died of COVID-19 describe the speed and severity with which the young people became ill.
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Anna Boyer-Killion was holding her son, Bryant, when he stopped breathing.
The 21-year-old woke his family up at their home in Champaign, Illinois, in the middle of the night on December 19. He was unable to control his asthma and asked to go to the hospital. But before they could leave, he had cardiac arrest.
“He put his arms around me and died in my arms,” Boyer-Killion told Business Insider.
Boyer had been hospitalized for chronic asthma before, but the coronavirus worsened his condition. Her mother started CPR after calling 911, and paramedics managed to get Bryant to the hospital. But he was pronounced dead there on December 21.
“He was always able to recover and it just wasn’t the same,” said Bryant’s aunt Sarah Boyer.
Bryant was far from the only young American to die from COVID-19 last year.
A December study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that almost 40% of excess deaths among Americans aged 25 to 44 from March to July were due to COVID-19. Almost 12,000 more people in this age group died during those five months than would be expected based on historical data. Of these, 4,535 deaths were caused directly by COVID-19.
In the past few months alone, six children in Northridge, California, have lost their 30-year-old mother to COVID-19. A 33-year-old mother in Detroit died days after giving birth to a child she never had. A father of two, 28, died after 84 days in the hospital. A husband lost his 34-year-old wife after she contracted the coronavirus by giving birth to her daughter in a hospital.
Most of these young adults did not have pre-existing illnesses like Bryant. Increasingly, it is clear that being young does not mean that you are protected from the worst effects of the virus.
‘It brought him down’
Kevin Lyster works as a police officer at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. When he tested positive for COVID-19, his son, Cody, was home from Colorado Mesa University for spring break. Kevin isolated himself at his home in Aurora, but soon after, Cody started to have a 40 degree cough and fever.
Cody was taken to the hospital on March 30. It was the last time that his parents and his sister saw him alive.
“He was a perfectly healthy 21-year-old college athlete who did all the things he was supposed to do to stay healthy and it knocked him down,” said Kevin.
Cody, who played baseball, died in intensive care with a respirator on April 8. His parents communicated with their son for the last time through a live stream from Facebook, kept in Lyster’s hospital bed by a nurse.
“We got to see Cody and said we were thinking about him,” said his father. “And little did we know, in a matter of hours, he would die.”
Cody was in an induced coma at that point.
“They say he couldn’t hear us,” said Kevin, but added, “Having to disagree, I think he heard everything we said.”
Young Americans are dying at above average rates
The chance of someone 65 and older dying from coronavirus is 90 times greater than someone between 20 and 29, according to the CDC. From May to August, 78% of coronavirus deaths in the United States were from people aged 65 and over.
But this narrative, which has become almost common knowledge, hides another truth: that COVID-19 hospitalized and killed an unprecedented number of young Americans.
“My son is proof of that,” said Kevin Lyster.
A September study found that from April to June alone, more than 3,300 Americans aged 18 to 34 were hospitalized with COVID-19 and 21% required intensive care. About 3% died.
Jeremy Faust, the lead author of the December study and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, found that in July alone – a particularly deadly month for the 25 to 44 age group – over 16,000 people died in that demographic. That’s about 5,000 more people than the July average for the past two decades. Weekly mortality rates were almost 50% higher than the average of the five previous Julys.
Overall, in 2020, according to Faust, historical data suggested that some 154,000 Americans aged 25 to 44 would die. But the numbers his team calculated showed that the death toll exceeded 165,000 in early December. And that doesn’t even include the last weeks of the year.
Once those additional deadly weeks are taken into account, Faust estimated, “170,000 is a low estimate and 175,000 seems like a very reasonable number.”
Most of the young adults who died were people of color, he said.
A comparison of weekly deaths throughout 2020 reveals the sharp increase as well. Last year, between 2,500 and 2,900 people in the young adult age group died each week.
“This year, we haven’t seen an average weekly figure below 3,000 since March 14th. That’s crazy,” said Faust.
“An increase in deaths generally does not affect the younger, healthier population,” he added. “It is extremely unusual for this to happen.”
Fausto’s data weakens the prevailing wisdom that COVID-19 is relatively harmless to younger people.
“We are not changing this message, but correcting it,” he said. Faust thinks that young people also need to be informed that they are at risk and that essential frontline workers need to be better protected.
Bryant Boyer-Killion died during the deadliest pandemic month so far
December was the deadliest month of the pandemic to date. More than 65,000 people in the US died last month from COVID-19. The US has seen an increase in hospitalizations and cases, driven in part by Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hospitalizations jumped from almost 99,000 to more than 125,000 between December 1 and 31 – an increase of 27%. Six million Americans became ill during that time.
Bryant Boyer-Killion’s aunt said it has been frustrating to see so many Americans continue to travel and reunite as the pandemic worsens.
“It’s hard to see people who don’t seem to care, you know, while you’re grieving,” said Boyer.
Bryant worked as a security guard at the Carle Foundation Hospital, where he was born. This put him at the start of the vaccine line: he was scheduled to have his first injection on December 22, the day after he died.
“You may not care if you succeed, but you can give it to someone else who cannot fight it. And my son is an example of that,” said Anna Boyer-Killion.
Anna thinks Bryant caught the coronavirus at work and would like the hospital to test employees more regularly. Her son knew that his work had risks, she said, but “he always stood up and tried to show me that he was not afraid”.
Bryant cared so much about his job that he spent his 21st birthday in April working a 12-hour shift. Anna said he always acted like this: after Bryant’s father, John Killion, suffered an accident at work in 2015, Bryant started helping to care for his younger sister, Riley.
A tattoo on his arm said, “my sister’s protector”.
Bryant’s family buried him the day after Christmas.
Days after his death, Anna said, she tried not to close her eyes because she would see him dying in her arms.
“He was everything to me,” she said.
Coronavirus is the leading cause of death in the USA
Since November 1, the coronavirus has become the leading cause of death in the United States, overcoming heart disease and cancer, according to a recent analysis. More than 4,000 Americans died of COVID-19 on Thursday – another record.
But Kevin Lyster said he is not sure whether his son’s friends understand that they are not invincible. Last month, he said, he heard that one of Cody’s friends wanted to throw a New Year’s party.
“I’m like, ‘Didn’t you get any of that?'” Said Kevin.
Some 366,000 people have died in the United States since the pandemic began, although this is almost certainly a lower count. A projection estimates that the virus could kill more than 200,000 more people in the United States by April 1.
More than nine months after Cody’s death, his parents and younger sister, Sierra, still struggle with his absence.
“He brought this house to life,” said Kevin.
Cody helped coach Sierra’s youth softball team and spent Sundays at college walking dogs at the Roice-Hurst Humane Society.
“We didn’t even know he did that until we received a condolence card from Roice-Hurst,” said Kevin, adding, “He was trying to make the world a better place, without any recognition.”
The holidays intensified the Lysters’ pain.
Cody was an advocate of Christmas traditions – he and Sierra always exchanged the family’s first gifts on Christmas Eve, said his mother Lea Ann. Cody had a knack for guessing what his gifts were, she added, so the family would take extreme measures to keep him alert, designing scavenger hunts and exchanging gift tags.
“He put the magic on Christmas,” said Lea Ann, adding, “don’t take the time you spend with your loved ones for granted.”
She and Kevin made sure that Sierra still had a gift from Cody under the tree this year.
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