Amid the surge of the Delta variant in the US, hospitalisation rates for the adults in their 30s due to Covid-19 have hit record highs, making it the “pandemic of the young”.

New Covid-19 hospital admissions for patients in their 30s reached an average of 1,113 per day for the week that ended Wednesday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That average daily hospitalisation rate had jumped 22.6 per cent from 908 in the previous seven days, according to the CDC.

“All of these younger age groups that we previously thought were relatively spared from severe outcomes from Covid up to 50 years, those hospital admission rates are all moving upwards at a dizzying pace unfortunately,” Dr James Lawler, co-director of the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

“So this is not only the pandemic of the unvaccinated in the US, it’s a pandemic of the young now,” he added.

The CDC data shows that thirty somethings made up 170,852 out of more than 2.5 million new hospital admissions for Covid-19 since August 2020, the report said.

The data shows that the seven-day average for new hospitalisations among those aged 18 to 29 reached 694 on Wednesday, up 20.7 per cent from 575 average the week prior. There have been 124,633 people aged 18 to 29 hospitalised since August.

The average daily hospitalisation rate for children under 17 also shot up a shocking 31.2 per cent, from 201 to 263, the CDC data shows. There have been 47,172 hospitalisations of minor children from Covid-19 since last August.

Children under age 12 remain ineligible to get the Covid-19 vaccine, while vaccination rates for young adults under 40 continue to lag.

CDC vaccination data trends show that only 49.6 per cent of adults aged 25 to 39 are considered fully vaccinated – while 45.1 per cent of adults aged 18 to 24 are fully vaccinated.

“It is not just a huge proportion of patients admitted to the ICU with Covid, it is also a much younger demographic than we’ve seen previously,” Lawler said.

“And again, I think this is another myth that young people don’t get very sick. And that is clearly not the case, particularly with Delta waves,” he noted.