People who endured even mild cases of covid-19 are at heightened risk two years later for lung problems, fatigue, diabetes and certain other health problems typical of long covid, according to a new study that casts fresh light on the virus’s true toll.
The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, is believed to be the first to document the extent to which an array of aftereffects that patients can develop — as part of the sometimes debilitating syndrome known as long covid — linger beyond the initial months or year after they survived a coronavirus infection.
According to the findings, patients who suffered bouts of covid severe enough to put them in the hospital are especially vulnerable to persistent health problems and death two years after they were first infected. But people with mild or moderate cases are not spared from the consequences when compared with those who never had covid, showing an elevated risk of two dozen medical conditions included in the analysis.
The study highlights the burden that continues to confront millions of people in the United States and the nation’s health-care system even though the federal government canceled the coronavirus public health emergency three months ago and the World Health Organization has declared the pandemic no longer a public health emergency of international concern.
“A lot of people think, ‘I got covid, I got over it and I’m fine,’ and it’s a nothingburger for them. But that’s not everything,” said the study’s senior author, Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After a couple of years, “maybe you’ve forgotten about the SARS-CoV-2 infection … but covid did not forget about you. It’s still wreaking havoc in your body,” said Al-Aly, chief of research at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.
Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/08/21/long-covid-lingering-effects-two-years-later