A teenager is being treated in an intensive care unit after contracting Covid-19 during the outbreak in NSW. The teen was one of 16 people treated in the ICU for coronavirus.
“Of the 16 people in the ICU, one is in their teens,” chief health officer Kerry Chant said on Saturday.
Dr Chant said the case is not being ventilated.
“Obviously we don’t release information about individual cases, but I think it is a salient lesson that Covid can impact across all age groups and I’m not aware of any other specifics around that case,” she said.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said officials had seen an unusual amount of young people with serious symptoms from Covid-19 during the current outbreak.
“We have a number of young people in ICU at the moment and that is a phenomena we have not seen before in terms of the broader population,” she said.
From the 16 people in the ICU, there was one each in the twenties, thirties, forties and eighties age group.
There were three people in their fifties, six people in their sixties and two people in their seventies among the ICU patients as well.
Five of the people were on ventilators.
Earlier in the week, at a point when eight people under 35 were hospitalised from Covid-19, Dr Chant sought to highlight that the disease can affect people of any age.
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“(This) should dispel the myth that this is something that only impacts on the elderly … A bit of a wake-up call to young people,” she said on Wednesday.
Since the pandemic hit Australian shores in March last year, most infections have been in people aged between 20 to 50 years, according to the Commonwealth health department.
The number of cases was the highest in people in their twenties.
The Delta strain of coronavirus, which is circulating in Sydney, is much more transmissible than the original strain of the virus or the Alpha variant, first detected in the UK.
There is also early evidence the Delta strain leads to more hospitalisations.
A Scottish study published in medical journal The Lancet last month found the risk of hospital admission doubled in people infected with the Delta strain compared with the Alpha strain.
The study also found both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines were effective in reducing the risk of infection and hospitalisation for the Delta variant.
The Delta variant was first identified in India.