Italy has got the highest deaths until now, beating China in this. There are almost 10,023 deaths this far. Total cases of Coronavirus in Italy stands at 92,472 as of 29th march. The situation is worsened to a level where hospitals are now making decisions about who to treat and who to leave to die. It is destructive; not only this, they aren’t counting dead bodies now because they are several on a daily basis.
The reason why Italy is in this crisis and suffering badly, write the University of Oxford researchers in the journal Demographic Science, maybe because Italy possesses the second-oldest population on earth and their youngsters tend to mingle with their grandparents. This is getting serious as almost the whole world is grappling this virus, and we are trying to find the reasons and learning about how the virus is transmitting within families and communities.
In Italy, the old population over age 65 around is 23%, whereas, in the US, this population is around 16%. University of Oxford demographer and epidemiologist Jennifer Beam Dowd, lead author of the new paper, says
“Extended longevity has played some role in changing the population structure, but it has most to do with how rapid the decline in fertility has been in a population.”
Not only this, the young generation interacts with the elderly often in Italy, Dowd’s Italian coauthors noticed that young population is living with their parents or grandparents in rural areas but worked in different cities for living, Italy has the similar arrangements.
The author enlightens this point that frequent travel between cities and rural areas can contribute to spreading novel coronavirus on a large scale. The city has a larger population, and people interact more there. The young population tends to socialize with people in cities and bring the disease at home. Even if they have no symptoms, they are acting as a carrier who can infect the elders, the most vulnerable population.
Read more : Symptoms of Coronavirus
Carlos Del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine at Grady Health System, said, “We know the mortality rate is higher in old people, but we don’t know why.” Giving an example, he said it might be due to a weak respiratory system and immune system, which leads this disease to pneumonia, which has a higher mortality rate among seniors.
Researchers were trying to find why it doesn’t infect children on this large scale and pointed out the corollary: Kids tend to have a good immune system and pristine lungs that have not exposed to allergens, pollutants, and not damaged by lifetime inflammation due to diseases. This might make them resistant to coronavirus
In spite of a full lockdown situation, CoVID-19 has spread far and wide. But this type of informative knowledge is beneficial to confront the threat elsewhere.
Dowd stated “One of the points that we were trying to make is that it’s not necessarily just about isolating the older population—we are identifying that they’re the most vulnerable—but the general social distancing that’s being encouraged to flatten the curve,”
Flattening the curve means slowing the rate of infections; this will help researchers to find new treatments and vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus. Which is more important when the higher fraction of the population is vulnerable.