Hoo boy. I really didn't want to write another post on this, because I feel my non-existent readers are tired of hearing of it. But really, while the pandemic is still with us (and, by the way, it is still with us), I think this issue needs to be at the front of the line of things we think of while managing our behavior.
What issue? This: "Survivors" of COVID-19 continue to present with symptoms of serious health conditions, mostly organ damage and neurologic conditions, that are serious enough to require hospitalization and occasionally lead to death.
What brought me around to this again was the study in The Lancet which is (appropriately, I think) getting a lot of attention: after studying literally millions of health records, they found that about one in three COVID survivors presented with "substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection. Risks were greatest in, but not limited to, patients who had severe COVID-19." The Lancet article is a little difficult for laypeople (or at least this layman) to get through; here's a more accessible summary. Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine also weighs in with a study that has a lot to say about these subsequent mental health and neurological diagnoses among people who were not hospitalized ("mild" case) or were not formally diagnosed at all, but are sure they had it.
The BMJ reports the results of a study of more than 47,000 patients, which found:
Over a mean follow-up of 140 days, nearly a third of individuals who were discharged from hospital after acute covid-19 were readmitted (14,060 of 47,780) and more than 1 in 10 (5,875) died after discharge, with these events occurring at rates four and eight times greater, respectively, than in the matched control group.
And even more disturbing, the NY Times reports a CDC study published in JAMA regarding mysterious inflammatory syndrome (MIS), a condition which has affected a small proportion (around 2,000) of children diagnosed with COVID. This study suggests that children with mild or no symptoms are much more likely to present later with serious organ damage:
The study, led by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that in over 1,000 cases in which information about whether they got sick from their initial Covid-19 illness was available, 75 percent of the patients did not experience such symptoms. But two to five weeks later, they became sick enough to be hospitalized for the condition, called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which can affect multiple organs, especially the heart... the study said that “most MIS-C illnesses are believed to result from asymptomatic or mild Covid-19” followed by a hyper-inflammatory response that appears to occur when the patients’ bodies have produced their maximum level of antibodies to the virus. Experts do not yet know why some young people, and a smaller number of adults, respond this way.
Enough. We are all familiar with the blase assertion that "I don't have to worrry, I'm healthy/young/lucky, and I'll get it and be done with it." We've also heard many of our leaders suggest that everyone should get it and achieve herd immunity that way. Both approaches are arrogant, foolish and ignorant.
Don't get it. The new world will have enough challenges without having to cope with your completely avoidable organ failure or dementia. Or both.
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