Two young, healthy people died from COVID-19. There will be more, Fresno officials say
Recently reported COVID-19 deaths in Fresno County included younger patients — one between the ages of 18 and 44 and another between the ages of 45 and 64 — with no other medical conditions that contributed to their deaths.
“It’s a grim and concrete reminder that this can affect younger people,” said Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer.
The information was part of an updated mortality dashboard discussed by health officials Friday. The dashboard doesn’t include the three latest deaths reported on Friday.
As Fresno County and the San Joaquin Valley continue to see more COVID-19 cases, the chances that younger people who are generally healthy end up dying will become higher, Vohra said.
So far, most of Fresno County’s coronavirus patients who died were older and had what health officials call “co-morbidities,” or other medical conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, that make their coronavirus case more complicated and severe, eventually leading to their death.
In Fresno County, about one-third of patients who died of coronavirus-related illness had hypertension and about 37% had diabetes, according to county data.
Older Hispanics have a higher fatality rate compared to whites and other ethnicities, the data show.
Dr. Stephanie Koch-Kumar, a senior epidemiologist with Fresno County Public Health Department, cautioned that the data sample about ethnicity still is relatively small, and may be unreliable at this point.
“You don’t want to take too much out of it just yet until we get more data,” she said.