Are young & restless driving Covid-19 pandemic in UP?

LUCKNOW: Every second covid-19 patient in Uttar Pradesh is the 20s or 30, according to a demographic profile of the Covid-19 patients in UP.
“Of the total cases seen so far, 48.8% belong to the 21-40 years age group while 28.4% of the patients represented 41-60 years age bracket,” additional chief secretary health and family welfare, Amit Mohan Prasad said adding: “About 14% patients were below 20 while the remaining patients were above 60 years of age.”
If experts are to be believed, any kind of irresponsible behavior by people in this group contributes immensely to the covid-19 burden in the state.
“Estimates show that one positive patient in UP has at least four (3.6 to be precise) high risk contacts. Since the largest chunk of patients in the state belongs to the 20-40 years age bracket, they naturally form the biggest group of suspects as well with at least one of them turning positive (calculated on the basis of reproduction rate of 1.09 in UP),” said a senior officer engaged in surveillance work.
Then, trends have also indicated that young who move out of their homes for all purposes end up transmitting the infection to the elders and children in the family.
In fact studies in other parts of the country have shown that over 60% of the elderly covid-19 patients acquired the infection from someone else in the family.
“While many of these people may not even know that they were acting as a spreader because 80% of the covid-19 patients are asymptomatic but those who ignore safety protocols such as wearing masks or following hand hygiene were surely irresponsible,” believed former CMO Lucknow Dr SNS Yadav.
Even the World Health Organisation had expressed concern over ‘young being the driver of covid-19 epidemic in the Asia Pacific region.’ “The spread of the novel coronavirus in the Asia-Pacific region is being increasingly driven by people aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are unaware they are infected because they have no or mild symptoms,” WHO’s regional director Takeshi Kasai said in a press statement.
Director General of Indian Council of Medical Research Prof Balram Bhargava however said that the ‘irresponsible’ were driving the pandemic in India. “I wouldn’t say young or old but irresponsible, less cautious people who are not wearing masks are driving the pandemic in India,” he said at an official briefing on Tuesday.
Covid-19 tally 2.13 lakh with 5447 new cases: The coronavirus tally for UP crossed 2.13 lakh with 5447 new cases in the past 24 hours. This includes 52,651 cases of active infection. Health officials informed that Lucknow (707), Kanpur (298) and Prayagraj (276) were the biggest contributors of cases during the day. Health officials also recorded the death of 77 persons taking the total deaths to 3294. Twelve deaths each were recorded in Lucknow and Kanpur. They also noted that the total number of persons recovered reached 157876 on Friday with 4986 fresh entries.