The
death of the Broadway actor Nick Cordero from Covid-19 has shaken people far beyond the theater world, in large part because he was just 41 and reportedly had
no underlying health conditions.
Medical experts said that Mr. Cordero’s death underscored a multitude of unknowns about the coronavirus — including the ways it could imperil even young, healthy people who did not appear to be at increased risk of contracting severe disease.
The idea that ‘I’m young, I’ll be fine’ is not an idea that we can completely subscribe to,” said Dr. Utibe Essien, a physician and health equity researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.
Amanda Kloots, Mr. Cordero’s wife,
has said that he had
no known pre-existing conditions that might have worsened the course of his disease. As more data emerges, serious cases of younger, healthy people like him are becoming less of an anomaly, doctors said.
A young person who has no real medical comorbidities, but gets super sick and ends up on multiple support machines” is a clinical portrait that doctors are now seeing “a lot,” said Dr. Taison Bell, a physician specializing in infectious disease and pulmonary and critical care at the University of Virginia.
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These concerns are growing more pressing as the
average age of coronavirus patients trends down in states like Arizona,
Florida and Texas. “In general, younger people will do better than older people,” Dr. Bell said. “But once someone becomes critically ill, a lot goes out the window.”
Mr. Cordero fell into an age bracket with a Covid-19 death rate
estimated at 0.4 percent of confirmed cases, compared with nearly 15 percent for those over 80.