Long covid no joke for those who suffer
Ask anyone who has experienced the lingering maladies of the pandemic, and they’ll tell you long covid is no figment of the imagination. Tiredness, breathlessness, body aches and “brain fog” hang around for millions of people. Some of these symptoms are also common without covid, and researchers are trying to pin down with precision the lasting damage this virus can do to the human body. They are far from a full understanding.
That’s why a new study in Scotland is important. It was aimed at discovering the frequency, nature, determinants and impact of long covid on a large scale, to improve on previous partial results in other investigations. The first findings in the Long-COVID in Scotland Study are based on medical records and the experiences of more than 33,000 patients who had laboratory-confirmed covid and 62,957 who had never been infected. The researchers, Jill P. Pell of the University of Glasgow and colleagues, found about 6% of those infected had “not recovered” and 42% “only partially.”
This reinforces earlier findings that a large segment of people who are infected continue to suffer from one or more symptoms long after the infection has passed. In a study published in August from the Netherlands, researchers found post-covid symptoms lingered in about 1 in 8 people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a recent large study that 1 in 5 adults from 18 to 64 years old who had covid, and 1 in 4 ages 65 years and older, had at least one persisting health condition related to their covid infection. Yet another survey in April put the prevalence at 43%. A new study just published about long covid in Germany put prevalence at 28.5%.
Exactly what symptoms and troubles will persist is hard to know at this point, but common patterns are emerging. The Scottish study, published in Nature Communications, found that the risk of long covid was greater among those who had been hospitalized with covid, women, older people and those who are economically disadvantaged. The vaccinated showed reduced risk of seven long-covid symptoms. People who had symptomatic covid infections were “significantly more likely” than those who were never infected to suffer from 24 persistent symptoms out of 26 studied. These heightened risks included breathlessness, palpitations, chest pain and confusion. Overall, checking in with people who had covid after six, 12 and 18 months, the researchers found the most cited lingering symptoms were tiredness, headache, muscle aches and weakness, joint pain, breathless, anxiousness and depression and confusion and difficulty concentrating, among others.
The implications of this are immense. If the prevalence of long covid turns out to be 1 in 5 people, that’s 124 million of the 623 million infected so far worldwide who will carry the scars of the pandemic into the future, creating potentially large burdens on health care systems. There will be cascading effects in mental health and disability. The impacts will most certainly extend to jobs and education. When the pandemic is over, the world will be left with how to treat and remedy the troubles of the long-covid generation.