Covid impact lasts long beyond ‘recovery’
Seven months on, medical experts and researchers are still learning about the damage Covid-19 can do to people, short of killing them. The initial emphasis on the dangers of the coronavirus focused on the fact that it was new and deadly. It was a respiratory virus, not the flu, there was no vaccine, and it was particularly a threat to older people and those with health vulnerabilities. Perhaps that messaging contributed to the idea that younger people were somewhat invulnerable. They were less likely to die or show serious symptoms, if any. But we know more about it now and more attention needs to be paid to the many people who get coronavirus and have to live with its effects. In many cases, Covid-19 has serious symptoms and health impacts that may be ongoing.
Worldwide there have been 565,000 deaths from Covid-19 but 12.6 million confirmed cases.
People do not know which card they will be dealt. They may survive but be left with a permanent medical disability. As the pandemic has unfolded, plenty of people aged under 40 have died or had serious brushes with the virus. ABC reports the final words of a 30-year-old Texas patient who attended a “Covid party” were: “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”
It has also become clear that coronavirus can attack multiple organs. They include the lungs, brain, heart, and kidneys. Some patients are still showing chronic symptoms weeks after “recovery”.
A University College London study last week was the latest to report that Covid-19 patients could suffer neurological harm including strokes, brain inflammation and nerve damage, even in cases where respiratory symptoms were not severe.
New York University Langone autopsy director Dr Amy Rapkiewicz told CNN dead patients had clotting in small vessels as well. “This was dramatic because although we might have just expected it in the lungs, we found it in almost every organ.”
An outpatient study in Rome found that even two months after becoming infected, 87 per cent of people still had symptoms. Many still had fatigue, shortness of breath, joint pain, and chest pain.
The top US government expert on infectious diseases, Dr
Anthony Fauci, said last week that there may be a “post-viral syndrome” in which fatigue “can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus” and people “really do not get back to normal”.
The risk of dying or getting infected seem remote at the moment. But should the risk increase, coronavirus is something no one would want to live with.