Tracing the launch and deployment of a narrative that was also part of The New York City Pandemic Show script [Last Updated 16 March 2026]
March 16, 2020
- WHO Director-General says at a media briefing, “This is a serious disease. Although the evidence we have suggests that those over 60 are at highest risk, young people, including children, have died.”
- The U.S. Federal Government issues 15 Days to Slow the Spread proclamation. The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America say, “Even if you are young, or otherwise healthy, you are at risk and your activities can increase the risk for others.”
March 20, 2020
- Wall Street Journal: “At the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, several coronavirus patients under 40, including a few in their 20s, were on ventilators in the intensive-care unit as of Thursday. All were healthy before getting the virus, said Dr. Narasimhan.”
- Scott Gottlieb (Former FDA Commissioner and Pfizer Board Member) tweet: WSJ on #COVID19: “With the onslaught has come a surprise for many health-care workers: Far more young people than they expected are falling very ill. According to data by..New York City…56% of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the city…involved patients under the age of 50.”1
March 21, 2020
- Jessica Rose: “It’s not just about getting it and recovering. It’s not just about ‘young people aren’t getting it’. That’s not true. Young people are getting it. It’s, okay maybe the elderly have a higher chance of having a worse pathology and/or dying but it’s not exclusive to any group. That’s being shown by the statistics coming out of Italy, Iran. The United States is right behind them, Europe.“
March 23, 2020
- Risa Budoff (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center): “The emergency room gets busier every day. I feel it, the nurses feel it, the techs feel it. There’s a scary energy that continues to grow. I’ve seen multiple elderly people being Intubated daily since last week, and the scary part is that we’re starting to see younger people decompensate, also requiring intubation (a tube to breathe for you).”
March 24, 2020
- Celine Gounder (Bellevue Hospital): “[The patients] were younger than you might expect. They range from late twenties to late seventies but the median age was late forties so, you know, basically my age, about two thirds of them were men.”2
March 25, 2020
- Craig Spencer (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center)): “We are seeing everyone from every age group…Some of my sicker patients have been in their 30s and 40s. Some of the people we’ve been putting on a breathing tube are my same age.” | Retrospectively (3/30/24): “The past is being rewritten But none of us who witnessed those early days can scrub our memories of the pain, and horror We’ll never forget finding young, otherwise healthy people dead in a chair.”
- Colleen Smith (Elmhurst): “Many of the young people who are getting sick don’t smoke, they’re healthy, they have no co-morbidities. They’re just young, regular people between the ages of 30 and 50 who you would not expect to get this sick.”
March 26, 2020
- Sotirios Kassapidis (Mount Sinai/Northwell) “…and they’re all ages. Don’t delude yourself into thinking only the old will die. They’re all ages.” | Next day: “We’ve had patients from 30 to 80. No underlying conditions. If they have underlying conditions, that’s a strike against them.”
- Peter Shearer (Mount Sinai Brooklyn): “At the current moment I have 135 COVID-positive patients. There are probably another 10 or 15 that just don’t have test results back yet. And they are sick. They are the ones who need to be admitted to the hospital. It’s a few debilitated elderly from nursing homes, but there’s a lot of patients who are between the ages of 40 to 60 who may have some underlying health problems like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, and their lungs are very inflamed. They go from being moderately sick to crashing and needing to put on ventilators very quickly.”
March 29, 2020
- Dr. Mangala Narasimhan (Northwell) “I think there’s a misperception out there that this is targeting older people with a lot of medical problems that is not what we are seeing in our hospitals. Our hospitals have an average age of 60, and I have many 20, 30, 40 year-olds — many of them very, very sick on ventilators with no medical problems. So the majority of them are younger people with a few or no medical problems. So the misperception of this can’t hurt me because I’m young, I think, is a dangerous one.”
- Dr. Cornelia Griggs (New York Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center): “My babies are too young to read this now. And they’d barely recognize me in my fear. But if they lose me to COVID I want them to know Mommy tried really hard to do her job. #GetMePPE #NYC” [Author: The Sky Was Falling]
April 9, 2020
- Michelle Pfeffer (EMT): “I’ve seen a lot of young people who are infected, one of which was our own member. She was 34 years old. I actually went through the EMS Academy with her, as well as paramedic school. She went home one day, collapsed, and ending up getting admitted into the hospital and did end up having to be intubated and in the ICU.”
April 12, 2020
- Mollie James (Travel Doctor from Iowa, Flushing Hospital): “We’re trying all these treatments, and we’re not making a huge difference. And I think there’s the impression that this is all older patients who have lots of medical issues, and there is some of that. But there’s also 20 and 30 and 40 year olds who are healthy, who are coming in and dying of COVID.”
April 21, 2020
- Sam Parina (NYU Lagone): “But we have plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, who are on ventilators with no real significant past medical history as well. So that’s just one element where the data is quite different [from Wuhan, Spain, and Italy].”
April/May 2020
- Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings (Travel Doctor from UW-Madison, Beth Israel): Speaking retrospectively – July 1, 2020 (with Paul Mayo): “The severity, morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 must be re-emphasized to all, both young and old, as it spares neither.” ~ January 26, 2024: “There was no common theme. In fact, most of my memory is not of the elderly. Maybe the elderly died before they could get to the hospital. Most of them – I just remember 40s, 50s, 60s—even a couple of 30, people in their 30s.” | “They were coming to the hospital – I don’t necessarily know where they were–not necessarily nursing homes. I mean, I had patients…many non nursing home patients. I just remember a lot of fathers, 48 to 52 on vents.”
May 15, 2020
- Eric Burnett (NYP Columbia): “My heart sank as I scrolled the seemingly endless list of patients. Mr. X died 8 days ago. Alone, in an ICU bed, connected to a ventilator. The 36-year-old father of two with no medical conditions: deceased.”
- Johanna Miele (Manager, Emergency Management + Enterprise Resilience, NYU Langone Health): “One day, I was working in the morgue, and I saw that one of the decedents had the same birth-year as me. I am 32; that early in the pandemic, we weren’t expecting a 32-year-old to die. We thought we’d primarily be seeing older people. That person was in the morgue for a very long time because the family was completely unprepared to lose such a young family member. There were so many unexpected deaths, and the funeral home industry became completely backlogged.”
Example Stories of Younger-Adult Deaths
March 17, 2020: Juan Sanabria (52)
March 27, 2020: Kious Kelly (48)
March 30, 2020 [incident date]: Anand Punja (45), London
April 2020: Rana Mungin (30)
April 4, 2020: Kyra Swartz (33) (obituary)
April 8, 2020: Hundreds of young Americans have now been killed by the coronavirus, data shows
April 25, 2020: Young and Middle-Aged People, Barely Sick with COVID-19, are Dying of Strokes
New York City appears to be domestic & global outlier in the number of younger-adult deaths & younger-adult COVID-19 deaths in spring 2020.
From Does New York City 2020 Make Any Sense?
Death Certificate Guidance
Vital Statistics Reporting Guidance published in April 2020 by HHS and related agencies gave two (of four) death certificate coding examples involving decedents under age 50:
- a 34-year-old female with no significant past medical history, and
- a 48-year-old male with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19.
Substack commenter Arne astutely noted that the inclusion of these examples in the guidance “helped put this scenario of a healthy, younger adult simply dying from covid in the minds of doctors.”
Footnotes
- Also Gottlieb, March 23, 2020: “While vast majority of deaths from #COVID19 are age 60+ many young adults and middle aged Americans are becoming seriously ill and surviving only after prolonged hospitalizations and ICU admissions that have long term consequences. This is a dangerous virus for most age groups.” ↩︎
- March 24, 2020 is very early for Dr. Gounder to be speaking in past tense. More recently, she has been talking about bird flu. ↩︎
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