Question: Among those who recover, what proportion have long-term symptoms? How about by age — like the charts from Friday?
Answer: The problem with understanding long-term consequences is that it requires time. Given where we’re at the pandemic, it’s still a bit too early to know long-term consequences, especially broken down by age. That said, it does appear that younger age is protective against long-term symptoms. And as would be expected, long-term symptoms are associated with disease severity. Here’s a bit of an update on what we currently know:
- Recovery takes time. As published in CDC’s MMWR, based on data collected through a telephone survey of individuals who were COVID positive and symptomatic, researchers found that after 2–3 weeks of testing positive, “35% had not returned to their usual state of health…. Among persons aged 18–34 years with no chronic medical conditions, one in five had not returned to their usual state of health.” (Figure 1)
- Hospitalized patients may suffer long-term lung and heart damage. The European Respiratory Society reported preliminary results from an Austrian study of hospitalized patients (primarily older, men, more likely to be smokers) that found at 6-weeks post-discharge,” more than half of the patients had at least one persistent symptom, predominantly breathlessness and coughing, and CT scans still showed lung damage in 88% of patients. However, by the time of their next visit 12 weeks after discharge, the symptoms had improved and lung damage was reduced to 56%…. At the six-week visit, the echocardiograms showed that 48 patients (58.5%) had dysfunction of the left ventricle of the heart at the point when it is relaxing and dilating (diastole). Biological indicators of heart damage, blood clots and inflammation were all significantly elevated.” CDC describes both lung and heart problems in its public webpages on long-term effects of COVID-19.
- Chronic fatigue is increasingly reported. This article published a couple of weeks ago in Nature, “The lasting misery of coronavirus long-haulers” offers a great synthesis of what we know and don’t know. As reported, “One study of 143 people with COVID-19 discharged from a hospital in Rome found that 53% had reported fatigue and 43% had shortness of breath an average of 2 months after their symptoms started. A study of patients in China showed that 25% had abnormal lung function after 3 months, and that 16% were still fatigued.”
- Studies are in progress. A number of studies are in progress to follow COVID cases over time to understand long-term effects, some of which we described in our Q&A of 6/11 #Recovery.
- We’ve talked about #Recovery in previous posts, which have some useful information (see Q&A of 6/11, Q&A of 4/30, and Q&A of 3/18 #Recovery).
Figure 1. Recovery Takes Time (from CDC)
