How 74-year-old Trump's risk of hospitalization is five times greater than a someone in their 20s

Donald Trump and his wife Melania both tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday night, just hours after the president’s top aide Hope Hicks was confirmed to have contracted the virus.

The President and Hicks have travelled together on Air Force One multiple times over the last week, including to attend the disastrous opening presidential debate against Joe Biden on Tuesday night.

But while Hicks at 31-years-old is considered a low risk patient, at 74 years of age, Trump faces a much higher chance of being hospitalized with the virus, and falling victim to its harshest symptoms.

According to CDC statistics, patients between the ages of 65-74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than someone aged 18 to 29.

Patients in the elder category are also 90 times more likely to die in comparison to their younger counterparts. 

For every 1,000 people in their mid-seventies or older who are infected by COVID-19, around 116 will die – a fatality rate of 8.6 percent.

Trends in coronavirus deaths have been clear since early in the pandemic, with studies determining that age is by far the strongest predictor of an infected person’s risk of dying — a metric known as the infection fatality ratio (IFR), which is the proportion of people infected with the virus, including those who didn’t get tested or show symptoms, who will die as a result.

‘COVID-19 is not just hazardous for elderly people, it is extremely dangerous for people in their mid-fifties, sixties and seventies,’ Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College told Nature.com.

Levin predicted that getting COVID-19 is more than 50 times more likely to be fatal for a 60-year-old than driving a car.

But Henrik Salje, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, said ‘age cannot explain everything’, with gender also said to be a strong risk factor, with men twice more likely to die from the virus than women.

Salje’s conclusions are supported by figures from the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists have revealed that 1.7 percent of women who catch the virus will die compared to 2.8 percent of men, even though neither sex is more likely to catch it.

The differences in the male and female immune-system response may explain the divergent risks, according to Princeton University demographer, Jessica Metcalf.

Metcalf believes the female immune system might have an edge by detecting pathogens slightly earlier.

The immune system may also explain the risk of older people being at much higher risk of dying from the virus.

As people get older, the body develops low levels of inflammation, and COVID-19 may be pushing the already overworked immune system over the edge, Metcalf says.

Metcalf added that most of the worst outcomes for people with coronavirus tend to be associated with a ramped-up immune system. 

So far in the US, 7.31 million Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 208,000 have so far died – a fatality rate of around 2.9 percent.