Nearly a quarter of COVID-19 patients have persistent health concerns

 

PHOTO DAVID BOILY, ARCHIVES LA PRESSE

(Washington, D.C.) Nearly a quarter of people who have contracted COVID-19 face, a month later or more, health problems they had not experienced before their infection, according to a large study that analyzed the medical data of nearly two million Americans affected by the virus.

The survey is the largest ever conducted to study the long-term effects of the disease, according to Fair Health, an independent organization that has collected information provided by health insurance companies.  

Data from some 1.960 million people diagnosed positive for COVID-19 between February and December 2020 were reviewed.  

"While many patients recover from COVID-19 within a few weeks, some develop persistent or new symptoms more than four weeks after being diagnosed," the study says.

The two main problems experienced were pain (neuralgia, muscle pain...) 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, and then intestinal problems.

Patients who had already reported such symptoms before their COVID-19 infection were excluded from the study, says Fair Health, as well as those with diseases that could distort the results (cancer, renal failure...).

In detail, just over 23% of infected people went for treatment, a month or more after their infection, for at least one of the health concerns analysed.

The most severe cases of COVID-19 were more likely to cause such problems: nearly 50% of people hospitalized because of the virus experienced at least one of these health concerns, compared to 27% of symptomatic COVID-19 cases, but also, notably, almost 19% of asymptomatic cases.  

On the other hand, 0.21% of people reported having tinnitus 30 days or more after being infected with COVID-19, a problem already identified by other studies.  

Finally, of the patients hospitalized and discharged from hospital, 0.45% died within 30 days or more of infection. The risk of death for them was 46 times higher than for those who had not been 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-19", are gradually being studied by scientists.

But the causes "are still unknown," Notes Fair Health. "The hypotheses include a persistent immune response [...], damage caused by the virus, for example neuronal pathways, which take time to heal, or the long-term presence of a low level of virus."