Thread by @FLAHAULT

1/9-"Despite strong levels of vaccination among older pple, #COVID19 killed them at higher rates during this winter’s #Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses."
nytimes.com/2022/05/31/hea…

2/9 - "This winter’s wave of deaths in older people belied the #Omicron variant’s relative mildness. Almost as many Americans 65+ died in 4 months of the Omicron surge as did in 6 months of the #Delta wave,even though the Delta variant,tended to cause more severe illness/person."

3/9 - "This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, from Boston University who studies age patterns of #COVID19 deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”
jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

4/9 - "I think we are going to see the death rates rising,” said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It is going to become more and more risky for older adults as their immunity wanes."
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

5/9 - "I don’t think we should treat the premature death of older adults as a means of ending the pandemic,” Dr. Stokes said. “There are still plenty of susceptible older adults, living with comorbid conditions or living in multigenerational households,who are highly vulnerable.”

6/9 - "Sara Tartof, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, said that roughly 9 percent of people 65 and older in the study were immunocompromised, compared with 2.5 percent of adults under 50."
thelancet.com/journals/lanre…

7/9 - "Excess deaths were more heavily concentrated in people 65+ during the #Omicron wave than the #Delta surge. Overall, there were more excess deaths in Massachusetts during the first 8 wks of Omicron than during the 23-wk period when Delta dominated."
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

8/9 - "A drop-off in Covid precautions this winter, combined with the high transmissibility of #Omicron, left older people more exposed. While older people had once been wearing masks at rates higher than those of younger people, that gap had effectively disappeared by mid-2021."

9/9 - "Antiviral pills are now being administered in greater numbers, but it is difficult to know who is benefiting from them. Scientists said that the wintertime spike in #COVID19 death rates among older Americans demanded a more urgent policy response."