One of the more interesting things to come out of the data on COVID from other countries is that those with higher testing rates, like South Korea, are showing a very different picture of infection rates by age than those, like Italy, who are only testing people with clear symptoms. (Note, these are from a medium article, but it pretty well sourced):
In Italy, which so far has a very high mortality rate (around 7%), and where they have so far only tested people with symptoms, the infection rates by age group compared to their percentage of the population looks like this:
In South Korea, which so far has a mortality rate below 1% of all confirmed cases, and where they’ve been doing far more widespread testing, including people without symptoms, the infection rates by age group compared to their percentage of the population looks like this:
The lower relative death rate reported in SK is at least partly the result of doing far more tests. So far SK has done almost 250,000 COVID tests, the highest of any country outside China, which means approximately 5% of their total population has been tested. Italy is next, at 86,000 tests, but has a population slightly higher than SK, so their testing rate works out to 1.4%. But the more significant takeaway is that by doing more tests, SK is identifying more cases that are either asymptomatic, or that are mild, and these are the ones most likely to occur in younger, healthier people. The fact that almost 30% of their cases are in people in their 20s, means that there are a lot of asymptomatic or low-symptomatic but contagious young adults there, and likely in other countries too, and that they are actually more likely to have contracted COVID than other groups. There are some other possible confounding factors (e.g. it might be that people in their 20s in SK are being tested at an unusually high rate compared to other groups, etc.) that we don’t know, but it’s still a very striking finding. Only people in their 50s have infection rates that somewhat exceed their percentage of the population, and the difference is far less pronounced.
Anyway, my point is, if you’re in your 20s and currently disregarding advice for “social distancing” based on the fact that you think you’re unlikely to have COVID, you might be doing a lot more harm than you think.
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