Studies on the coronavirus are linked and converge on the same observation: the virus has long-term consequences on people who have contracted it. A large American study was published this Tuesday, June 15 by Fair Health, an independent organization that collected information provided by health insurance companies. The data of some 1.960 million people diagnosed positive for Covid-19 between February and December 2020 were examined. Almost a quarter of people who have contracted Covid-19 face, a month or more later, health problems that they did not experience before their infection.
This survey is the largest ever to study the long-term effects of the disease, according to Fair Health.
Pain and difficulty in breathing
“Although many patients recover from Covid-19 within a few weeks, some show persistent or new symptoms more than four weeks after being diagnosed.”, describes the study. The two main problems experienced were pain (neuralgia, muscle pain, etc.) for 5% of people, and difficulty breathing in 3.5% of cases. They were followed by hyperlipidemia (concentration of lipids in the blood) or hypertension, indisposition or great fatigue, anxiety, then intestinal problems. Patients who had already reported such symptoms before their Covid-19 infection were excluded from the study, specifies Fair Health, as well as those suffering from diseases that could falsify the results (cancer, renal failure, etc.).
In details, just over 23% of infected people went for treatment, a month or more after their contamination, for at least one of the health concerns analyzed.
More risks for severe cases
The most serious cases of Covid-19 were more likely to cause such problems: nearly 50% of people hospitalized with the virus have experienced at least one of these health concerns, against 27% of symptomatic Covid-19 cases, but also, notably, almost 19% of asymptomatic cases. In addition, 0.21% of people reported having tinnitus 30 days or more after being infected with Covid-19, a problem already noted by other studies.
Finally, of patients hospitalized and discharged, 0.45% died within 30 days or more of infection. The risk of death for them was 46 times greater than for those who were not hospitalized. One of the limitations of the study is that a test group of people without Covid-19 was not analyzed as a point of comparison.
The persistent symptoms of Covid-19, cases called “long Covid”, are gradually being studied by scientists. But the causes “are still unknown”, note Fair Health. “The hypotheses include a persistent immune response (…), damage caused by the virus, for example to neural pathways, which take time to heal, or the long-lasting presence of a low level of virus”.
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