By Jerry Bellune

JeryBellune@yahoo.com

Chronicle columnists Val and Wayne Augustine just found out a friend had died.

The chances he was innocently infected with covid-19 by a younger relative are high.

The latest research suggests that young people account for the majority of infections but the elderly account for most of the deaths.

“It’s a social moral dilemma,” said Mun Sim Lai, a population-affairs officer with the United Nations.

“Young people get the virus and don’t die but they are the ones spreading it to old people.

"This is true over the world.”

Dr. Lai analyzed data from 55 countries, including the US and found that through Sept. 1 people who were 65 and older were just 12% of confirmed cases but 66% of deaths.

Those who were 44 and younger accounted for 60% of known cases but only 7% of deaths.

In the countries Dr. Lai examined, 11.7 million people younger than age 65 had been infected with covid-19 and around 169,400 died.

In comparison, 1.6 million older people had been infected and around 331,000 died.

That doesn’t mean younger people have gotten a free pass.

The number of covid-19 deaths is low for ages 25 to 44 but mortality increased by around 25% this year compared with the previous 5 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Even though it’s a relatively small number of deaths, it’s a big impact,” Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, told Wall Street Journal science reporter Jo McGinty.

“It’s an additional 4th of what’s normal.”

Consider how many people were expected to die this year based on historical data versus how many actually died.

In the US, there were 10 deaths for every 10,000 people ages 25 to 44 in the 1st 32 weeks of the year from 2015 through 2019, Dr. Lai said.

Under normal circumstances, she would anticipate about the same mortality rate this year.

“But what has happened,” she said, “is there were about 12 deaths for every 10,000 people ages 25 to 44 years old. The absolute risk for dying for that group is about 2 deaths per 10,000 people more than we would expect.”

In the US, the leading cause of death for ages 25 to 44 is unintentional injury, including drug overdoses, with around 47,000 fatalities in 2018.

The 5th-leading cause of death for this group is homicide (behind suicide, cancer and heart disease) with 5,843 deaths in 2018.

So far this year, about the same number have died from covid-19, according to the CDC.

Experts caution that covid-19 might not have caused all of this year’s additional deaths.

For people 65 and older, Dr. Lai found 281 deaths per 10,000 people during the first 32 weeks of 2020 in the US, or about 40 more deaths per 10,000 people than expected.