Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Post-COVID Recovery Clinics

One thing the new world will have - because they're already here - is post-COVID recovery clinics.  I've never heard of a post-flu recovery clinic - you get over it and get on with your life - but COVID is different, as we have seen.

We are, unfortunately, learning a lot about the longer-term and permanent effects of the virus.  There is no doubt that these effects occur, in as many as a third to a half of cases, but we don't know how long they will persist, and we don't know, in most cases, why they occur.

Penn Medicine, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, already has a Post-COVID Recovery Clinic up and running.  You can read about it here.  There are others, and more are no doubt on their way.

As of this moment, almost 38 million cases of COVID-19 have been identified worldwide.  If only the tiniest fraction of them need help managing long-range and permanent side effects, healthcare in the new world will be very different.  But it's not going to stop at 38 million, and you know the numbers - one third to one half.  Do the math.

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