The big idea
Even mild cases of COVID-19 can have major and lasting effects on people’s health. That is one of the reasons known from our recent multicountry study on prolonged COVID-19 – or prolonged COVID – was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Explained high COVID as the persistence or progression of symptoms three months after the initial infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These symptoms last for at least two months after onset without any other explanation.
We found that a staggering 90% of people with severe COVID initially experienced only mild illness with COVID-19. After developing long-term COVID, however, the average person experiences symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive problems such as brain fog — or a combination thereof — that affect daily functioning. . These symptoms have a health impact as severe as long-term effects of traumatic brain injury. Our study also found that women have twice the risk of men and four times the risk of children with elevated COVID.
We analyzed data from 54 studies that reported on more than 1 million people from 22 countries who experienced symptoms of COVID-19. We counted how many people with COVID-19 developed clusters of new long-term COVID symptoms and determined how their risk of developing the disease varied based on their age, sex and whether they hospitalized due to COVID-19.
We found that patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had a greater risk of developing prolonged COVID – and had longer-lasting symptoms – compared to people who were not hospitalized. However, since most cases of COVID-19 do not require hospitalization, many more cases of prolonged COVID arise from these milder cases despite their low risk. Among all people with elevated COVID, our study found that nearly one in seven were still experiencing these symptoms a year later, and researchers still don’t know how many of them cases can be chronic.
Why is this important?
Compared to COVID-19, relatively little is known about long-term COVID.
Our systematic, multi-country analysis of this situation provides findings that illuminate the potentially high human and economic costs of long-term COVID worldwide. Many people living with the condition are working-age adults. Being unable to work for months can cause people to lose their income, their livelihood and their home. For parents or caregivers with prolonged COVID, the condition may leave them unable to care for their loved ones.
We think, based on the spread and severity of prolonged COVID, that it is keeping people from working and therefore contributing to job shortages. High COVID may also be a factor in how people who lost their jobs affects women disproportionately.
We believe that finding effective and affordable treatments for people with advanced COVID should be a priority for researchers and research funders. Long-term COVID clinics open on provide special carebut the treatments they offer are limited, inconsistent and can be expensive.
What’s next
Long-term COVID is a complex and dynamic condition – some symptoms disappear, then return, and new symptoms appear. But researchers still don’t know why.
While our study focused on the three most common symptoms associated with high COVID that affect daily functioning, the condition can also include symptoms such as loss of smell and taste, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems and headaches, etc. But in most cases these additional symptoms occur together with the main symptoms that we estimate.
There are many unanswered questions about what predisposes people to prolonged exposure to COVID. For example, how different risk factors, including smoking and a high body-mass index, influence people’s tendency to develop the condition? Is it taking? reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 changing the risk of long-term COVID? Also, it is not clear how protection against high-risk COVID changes over time after a person already vaccinated or strengthened against COVID-19.
The variants of COVID-19 also present new puzzles. Researchers know that the omicron variant less lethal than previous strains. The initial evidence shows low risk of high COVID from omicron compared to earlier strains, but more data are needed.
Most of the people we studied were infected with deadlier variants which circulated before the omicron became dominant. We will continue to build on our research on long-term COVID as part of the Global Burden of Disease study – which produced estimates of death and disability from all diseases and injuries in every country in the world – to get a clearer picture of how the long-term toll of COVID-19 will shift when the omicron arrives .
Sarah Wulf HansonLead Research Scientist in Global Health Metrics, University of Washington and Theo VosProfessor of Health Metric Sciences, University of Washington
This article was reprinted from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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