Dr. Wissler and Dr. DeWitte, who have done similar research on the Black Death, saw a way to test the hypothesis about young people. When people have had lingering illnesses like tuberculosis or cancer, or other stressors like nutritional deficiencies, their shin bones develop tiny bumps.
Assessing frailty by looking for those bumps “is quite legitimate” as a method, said Peter Palese, a flu expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The researchers used skeletons at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Its collection of 3,000 people’s remains, kept in large drawers in a massive room, includes each person’s name, age of death and date of death.
Dr. Wissler said she treated the remains “with great respect,” as she examined the shin bones of 81 people aged 18 to 80 who died in the pandemic. Twenty-six of them were between the ages of 20 and 40.
For comparison, the researchers examined the bones of 288 people who died before the pandemic.
The results were clear: Those whose bones indicated they were frail when they got infected — whether they were young adults or older people — were, by far, the most vulnerable. Many healthy people were killed, too, but those who were chronically ill to start with had a much greater chance of dying.