Normally, the symptoms of any disease last till the infection is active but in the case of Covid-19, there is nothing typical to expect. A new study confirms that nearly one-third of Covid-19 patients suffer from long-term symptoms of the infection, despite recovering from the infection. This also shows up in mild cases where the patients take a slow time to recover from the infection.
Nearly 33% of all Covid-19 patients who didn’t require hospitalization continued to experience the long-term effects of the infection including brain fog, loss of taste, loss of smell, and fatigue.
The findings of this study are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
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The research team from the University of Washington (UW) found this unexpected side of Covid-19 where some people experience its symptoms even in the long-term. This adds to avoid contracting the virus in the first place and also signifies the importance of following precautions and warnings issued by health agencies.
According to this study, 90% of Covid-19 patients experience mild to moderate signs and didn’t require any intensive care or hospitalization. Only a few patients experienced extreme complications which subjected their health to risk. For example, 13% of patients had hypertension, 5% of patients had diabetes and 4.5% were chain smokers.
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But the long hauling symptoms don’t show up in hospitalized cases but also in those who recovered early. But recovering early from the infection doesn’t ensure that a person is completely fit and healthy, in fact, these Covid-19 symptoms can chase a person for a very long-term.
The United States has reported more than 28 million cases means most of these people are at a high risk of experiencing long-term side effects. It is possible for these people to suffer from Covid-19 signs for weeks, months, or even years.
Even if 25% to 30% of these cases are considered, it is still millions of people whose health and life quality is at stake. These Covid-19 after-effects may slow down with time, but in most cases, it takes months to completely get over them. The worst part is that nothing can help in this situation because there is no medicine to relieve Covid-19 symptoms.
These effects were most common in 65years old people or older (43%), followed by middle-aged people (30%) and then younger people (27%). This link of age and Covid-19 symptoms is worrisome as older people are already at a compromised health level, making them an easy target to develop secondary diseases, despite recovering from Covid-19.
This current study uses a limited number of people but these reports are very similar to the hospital data and common observance by the doctors. Interestingly, this data also shares similarities with data received from Canada, China, and England, presenting it as a similar pattern all over the world.
This pattern of long-term symptoms of Covid-19 also shows that this particular virus is more injurious than other viruses in the same family. It is unusual for a coronavirus to show long-term signs and they are more common with Epstein-Barr, Chikungunya virus, and West Nile that are completely different viruses.
