COVID-19 in the elderly and the immunocompromised

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory disease that is transmitted mainly through respiratory droplets from an infected person to an uninfected person which means that the disease can be contracted when there is a contact between an infected person and an uninfected person or an uninfected person and the virus on surfaces that have been contaminated by an infected person. This is possible both before and after an infected person is symptomatic. World Health Organization stated on the 2nd of April, 2020 that 95% of the number of death cases recorded in the world so far from COVID-19 was recorded among those who were older than the age of 60. Also, it was mentioned that about half of all the death cases recorded so far are 80 years of age or more. Furthermore, World Health Organization also stated that 8 out of 10 death cases occurred among people with underlying symptoms and those who have at least another disease such as those with cardiovascular diseases and other chronic underlying conditions before being infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5812/ijhls.105955

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/327506/