Many COVID-19 survivors in Italy haven’t fully recovered
Almost half of people screened report medical problems
BERGAMO, Italy — The first wave is over, thousands have been buried, and in a city that was once the world’s coronavirus epicenter, the hospital is calling back the survivors. It is drawing their blood, examining their hearts, scanning their lungs, asking them about their lives.
Twenty people per day, it is measuring what the coronavirus has left in its wake.
Six months ago, Bergamo was a startling warning sign of the virus’s fury, a city where sirens rang through the night and military trucks lined up outside the public hospital to ferry away the dead. Bergamo has dramatically curtailed the virus’s spread, but it is now offering another kind of warning, this one about the long aftermath, where recoveries are proving incomplete and sometimes excruciating.
Those who survived the peak of the outbreak in March and April are now negative. The virus is officially gone from their systems.
“But we are asking: Are you feeling cured? Almost half the patients say no,” said Serena Venturelli, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital.
Bergamo doctors say the disease clearly has full-body ramifications but leaves wildly differing marks from one patient to the next, and in some cases few marks at all. Among the first 750 patients screened, some 30% still have lung scarring and breathing trouble. The virus has left another 30% with problems linked to inflammation and clotting, such as heart abnormalities and artery blockages. A few are at risk of organ failure.
Beyond that, according to interviews with eight Pope John XXIII Hospital doctors involved in the work, many patients months later are dealing with a galaxy of daily conditions and have no clear answer on when it will all subside: leg pain, tingling in the extremities, hair loss, depression, severe fatigue.
Some patients had preexisting conditions, but doctors say survivors are not simply experiencing a version of old problems.
“We are talking about something new,” said Marco Rizzi, the head of the hospital’s infectious-disease unit.
The study in Bergamo is one of multiple efforts around the world to examine aspects of COVID-19’s lingering damage. One German study of 100 people found that nearly 80% had heart abnormalities several months after infection. Other studies are underway to look specifically at “longhaulers” — a subset of people who have fatigue and other symptoms months after the illness.
Some of the doctors in Bergamo see reasons for encouragement in their findings, especially given the severity of what patients faced in March and April and the trial-and-error treatments they were given. They say that patients’ breathing seems to gradually improve, even though the lung scarring is permanent.
“Many of them coming in for repeat visits, they are doing better now than they were in May,” said Caterina Conti, a lung specialist.
For the patients who have been able to regain a semblance of their lives, the last barrier is the trauma itself — the raw memory of being in a hospital where so many were dying, and wondering if they might be next.
Survivor Guido Padoa, 61, said he remembers hearing others in his ward struggling to breathe, and seeing hospital workers remove the bodies, change the bedsheets. With his own lungs on the brink of failure, he worried what might happen if he let his eyes close, so he drew on his training four decades earlier as a paratrooper. Under an oxygen helmet, as it beeped and hissed, he willed himself to stay awake for five days, he said.
“It’s like when you are on a high mountain in the cold,” Padoa said. “If you fall asleep, you die.”