Like most Coloradans, I’ve been checking the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment’s COVID-19 case counts webpage daily. And as a Gen Xer, I was struck by the proportion of cases among those of us in our 40s and 50s, which seemed higher than I’d expected based on the size of our cohort in the population. So, I grabbed Colorado’s 2020 population data from DOLA and made this graph. As I’d thought, Gen Xers have more than our share of COVID-19 cases, though so does everyone over age 30. Compared to older groups, there are way fewer cases among young people aged 0 to 19, and just slightly fewer for people in their 20s.

To be fair, because Colorado is only testing people with more serious symptoms, this graph really shows the distribution of serious COVID-19 cases. We don’t really know if young people are less likely to contract the disease. A lot of news reports have suggested that younger people have milder cases or are asymptomatic, and those groups can’t get widely tested yet. As testing ramps up, we’ll report back on how this picture changes.

Until then, keep laying low, Colorado! I’ll be at home making graphs for fun in Excel. 😊