Study by Italy Shows 99% of COVID-19 Fatalities Have Underlying Health Conditions


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Italy’s COVID-19 situation is really bad when the whole country is in lockdown while people are ordered (for those not in the loop, yep. Ordered, not advised.) to stay at home.

Which on the positive side gives us random videos of entire Italian neighbourhoods singing ballads together:

But the reality is that the situation is bad enough for medical students to essentially graduate earlier just to combat COVID-19 as doctors. Which is basically the medical equivalent of promoting a chao recruit with a week left in BMT to Sergeant just to join the battlefield.

And here are a few quotes from medical professionals in a city in northern Italy, just to hammer that in:

“I have never seen so many people die together before my eyes. It feels like we are crossing in the middle of a battlefield.”

“We are getting sick one after the other.”

“Here, probably 20 to 30 per cent of health care professionals got infected. In my department, I have 25 paediatricians, and currently, 10 are off sick. This is the same in other departments, and it’s a major challenge.”

Yeah, when I’m saying join the battlefield, I’m not joking. Imagine being a medical student in Italy now and reading the news saying 1 in 5 health care professionals get infected.

So if there’s any time to say this on a family-friendly website, the time is now: h**y f**k.

Image: Knowyourmeme

But if anything good came out of it, is that Italy is a perfect place to get data.

More than 99% of COVID-19 Fatalities Have Underlying Health Conditions

As you’re sipping your bubble tea with 50% sugar, you’re probably wondering if diabetes is part of that equation. Unfortunately for you, yes. Yes, it is.

The study by Italy’s national health authority places fatalities with diabetes at a whopping 35%. 75% had high blood pressure, and about a third had heart disease.

Image: Bloomberg

In fact, only 0.8% had no previous health conditions. Almost half of the fatalities had at least 3 or more illnesses, and fatalities with 2 other illnesses, or only 1 other illness, are at a quarter of all fatalities.

Average Age of Fatalities is 79.5

And as you can expect, most people with many underlying conditions are the elderly. Only 17 people under the age of 50 had died from the disease in Italy thus far.

The victims under 40 are males with serious existing medical conditions.

Image: Bloomberg

The above data is compiled from 18% of medical records of the country’s coronavirus fatalities.


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You might be wondering why not just examine 100% of the fatalities, to which my answer is “no manpower”. We already told you chao recruit have to join the battlefield, didn’t we?

Currently, Italy’s death rate is at about 8%, much higher than in other countries. But there’s always a possibility that it’s due to undetected cases. Deaths in Italy have reached more than 2,500 with more than 31,500 confirmed cases.

Which sounds really bad, and it is, but more than likely it’s not a strange reason like the coronavirus being racist to Italians or that it’s a new strand of corona in Italy. Instead, the GIMBE Foundation estimates that about 100,000 Italians have contracted the virus, which brings the death rate closer to the global average of about 2%.

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The number of cases in Italy is underestimated because only patients with symptoms are being tested.

To the Italians:


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Image: Giphy

In the meantime, don’t you feel motivated to stay healthy now?