The Long Term Health Impacts of the Coronavirus
In the months since the novel coronavirus exploded into a pandemic, we have heard a range of stories about those who have been stricken by the disease, the vast majority with mild symptoms, but an increasing number needing to be hospitalized. But what about those who were reported to have recovered from the illness, which has no inoculation or cure?
More than one million people around the world have been deemed recovered from the coronavirus, but beating the initial sickness may be just the first of many battles for those who have survived. Past epidemics tell us that survivors have compromised immune systems. A study of SARS showed people were falling sick more frequently than others for as long as 12 years.
For clues on how COVID-19 may leave its mark, doctors and researchers are looking to the experience of SARS. Some survivors suffered long-term effects years after they first succumbed to the disease, which is part of the same family as the new coronavirus.
Some recovered patients report breathlessness, fatigue and body pain months after first becoming infected. Small-scale studies conducted in Hong Kong and Wuhan, China, show that survivors grapple with poorer functioning in their lungs, heart and liver.
While it might feel like we’ve been in collective quarantine forever, Covid-19 is still a very new disease that has only been present in humans for six months. That means long-term studies of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and subsequent infection are in their infancy. However, experts can take clues from other viral illnesses to try to predict how survivors might fare one, two, five, or 10 years from now.
The coronavirus is now known to attack many parts of the body beyond the respiratory system, causing damage from the eyeballs to the toes, the gut to the kidneys. Patients’ immune systems can go into overdrive to fight off the infection, compounding the damage done.
Early Research
While researchers are only starting to track the long-term health of survivors, past epidemics caused by similar viruses show that the aftermath can last more than a decade. According to one study, survivors of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, suffered lung infections, higher cholesterol levels and were falling sick more frequently than others for as long as 12 years after the epidemic coursed through Asia.
Hong Kong’s hospital authority has been monitoring a group of Covid-19 patients for up to two months since they were released. They found about half of the 20 survivors had lung function below the normal range.
A study of blood samples from 25 recovered patients in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged, found that they had not fully recovered normal functioning regardless of the severity of their coronavirus symptom.
Chronic cardiac complications could arise in patients even after recovery as a result of persistent inflammation, according to an April 3 paper by doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. They based their analysis on patient data from Italy and China.
Economies and companies looking to get people back to work will need to understand how and if Covid-19 affects human health in the long run and its scope. Hospitals and researchers will have begun patient registries to start gathering data to study survivors over time as well.
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