Coronavirus: 12-year-old fighting for life as Fauci admits younger people being harder hit in US

'I have a message for young people: You are not invincible, this virus could put you in hospital for weeks or even kill you'

Emma, 12, had no pre-exisiting conditions before she was infected with the coronavirus. Now she’s “fighting for her life” in an Atlanta hospital, according to her family.

Though Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta-Scottish Rite Hospital - where Emma’s family says she’s being treated - confirmed to CNN that a patient there had tested positive for Covid-19, it did not go into further details.

“The patient remains in isolation, and we have consistently used appropriate precautions. Additional details will not be released due to patient privacy laws,” hospital spokeswoman Jessica Pope said.

Emma’s cousin, Justin Anthony, said she was on a ventilator but stable.

Though older individuals and those with underlying illnesses are more at risk from coronavirus - 80 percent of US coronavirus deaths are in people 65 and over, especially among those over 85 - young people are not immune, and those in America seem more at-risk than their peers in China.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing that, as of March 16, up to 40 percent of people hospitalised due to coronavirus were between the ages of 20 to 54.

Twelve percent of intensive care admissions were among individuals aged 20 to 44, while 36 percent were for those between ages 45 to 64.

Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said US health officials are looking “very closely” at the report during a segment on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“It looks like there is a big difference between that demography from China and what we’re seeing in Europe,” Mr Fauci said. “Now we have to look at the young people who are getting seriously ill from the European cohort and make sure that it isn’t just driven by the fact that they have underlying conditions, because we know that underlying conditions - all bets are off no matter how young you are if you have an underlying, serious medical condition. You’re going to potentially get into trouble.”

According to the CDC, in addition to people over 65-years-old, individuals with chronic lung disease or moderate to severe asthma, those with heart disease and related complications, the immunocompromised, those who are severely obese with complications like diabetes, renal failure or liver disease, and pregnant people may be at greater risk.

“If they don’t have underlying conditions, that will be something we will have to really examine as to why we’re seeing it here but we didn’t see it in China,” Mr Fauci said.

Jeffrey Ghazarian, a 34-year-old cancer survivor, died Thursday after spending five days on a ventilator, according to the New York Daily News, and Fiona Lowenstein, a 26-year-old yoga teacher who said she had no underlying conditions, wrote about how the virus sent her to the hospital Monday in The New York Times.

In her essay, she exhorts millennials and Gen-Zers to take the threat seriously and stay home.

“Unfortunately, much of our generation - and some younger than us - is not taking this public health crisis seriously enough. We’re continuing to gather in groups, travel internationally, and see quarantine as an extended spring break,” she wrote. “As a generation with a supposed commitment to social justice, we should be stepping up in our role as allies to more vulnerable populations.”

Crowds were seen gathering on beaches in recent weeks as college students celebrated their spring breaks, and popular tourist spots - like Washington, D.C.’s tidal basin, where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom - had to be shut down by the National Guard to keep people from crowding.

The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned young people across the planet not to take the threat of the virus lightly during an online news conference.

“I have a message for young people: You are not invincible, this virus could put you in hospital for weeks or even kill you. Even if you don’t get sick, the choices you make about where you go could be the difference between life and death for someone else,” he said.