In the spring of 2020, the “long Covid” didn’t even have a name. In the first outbreak of the pandemic, researchers focused on the immediate, short-term consequences of coronavirus infections, and doctors paid little attention to the symptoms of “long-term ill Covid”, which, in turn, could not find support in any organized composition.

Now, almost three years later, the chronic effects of the coronavirus have become much more familiar, and the protracted Covid is recognized by the World Health Organization, heads of state and renowned experts. In the US National Institutes of Health they run a billion dollar research program understand how and with whom long-term symptoms of the disease appear.

Hundreds of long-term Covid clinics are accepting patients, and recent evidence suggests that well-tested drugs to treat or prevent long-term Covid may become widely available in the future.

No protocol, vaguely defined

But despite all the advances, long-term Covid still lacks a universal clinical definition, and there is still no standardized diagnostic protocol, nor broader agreement on some of the possible symptoms, Atlantic notes in its analysis.

While experts now agree that long-term Covid is more of an “umbrella” term, much like cancer, they disagree on how it manifests itself and the number of subtypes that fall under this category.

A number of risk factors have been identified: hospitalization for Covid, gender (nearly two out of three patients with long-term Covid-19 are women, according to an international study published last year), pre-existing health problems, but as one country after another announces virus “endemic”, long Covid researchers, patients and activists are worried about the future.

Recent data from two long-term studies suggest that the number of patients coexisting with long-term Covid-19 may be declining, although rates of new infections remain high.

Around two million people reported symptoms of prolonged Covid in early 2023, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. In August 2023, 2.3 million people in the country reported long-term symptoms of Covid. Another study of similar reports in the US also recorded a slight drop in the number of American adults who said they had long-standing Covid, from about 7.5% to about 6%.

Rates have declined despite both countries continuing to record massive numbers of infections even into the third year of the pandemic. It is possible that in any given case, someone’s risk of developing long-term Covid after being infected with the coronavirus may have been lower than when the pandemic began., says Dr. Deepti Gurdasani is a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London and the University of New South Wales.

population immunity

Immunity levels in the population, especially due to vaccination, are better at protecting the body, and this is confirmed by numerous data. hypothesis that vaccines can reduce the risk of long-term Covid.

Litigation can also reduce the impact. Antiviral drugs now help contain the virus at an early stage of infection. Ventilation, social distancing and masks – when used – can limit the viral load that enters the body. “And if overall exposure to the virus can affect the likelihood of long-term Covid, that could explain why so many cases appeared at the start of the pandemic, when there were few interventions,” said Stephen Dicks, a medical researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. .

Katherine Wu notes that most long-term cases of Covid occur after mild infections, notes Katherine Wu for The Atlantic.

“The worst cases we saw came from the first wave of 2020,” Dix says. But neurologist David Putrino, head of Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 clinic, isn’t so sure. “If you brought me a patient with long Covid from the Omicron strain and a patient with the first wave of coronavirus, I would not be able to tell you who is who,” he comments.

These two cases would be difficult to compare also because they are separated by a large period of time. Long-term Covid symptoms can wax and wane and change. In a few years, patients who now exhibit this condition may find themselves in a situation similar to today’s Covid veterans.

They don’t fully recover.

What little data exists about the likelihood of recovery or remission is inconsistent and not always promising: researchers in the large US Recover study estimated that about two-thirds of long-term Covid patients do not return to the state of health they were in. before they got sick. And some say they don’t even see improvements over time.

“If the question is, ‘Are you doing what you were doing in 2019?’, the answer is basically no,” says Jayday Davids, a New York-based chronic disease consultant. And relapses are not uncommon, especially after repeated exposure to the virus.

Even now, with many other insurance companies aware of the long Covid, the waiting lists for rehab and treatment in the US are huge. If most researchers in the field turn their attention elsewhere and stop looking at causes in search of a possible cure, many fear that research on other, neglected chronic diseases, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome), which affects patients with long-term Covid diagnosed.

Keith Porter, a Massachusetts-based marketing firm executive, says she worries about her family’s future if interest in Covid wanes. Both she and her teenage daughter contracted the virus in the spring of 2020 and continued to have chronic symptoms and their “battle” with the protracted Covid is not yet over. After months of relative improvement, her daughter is now battling prolonged bouts of fatigue that keep her from attending school, and Porter isn’t sure how her explanations will be received by those around her if their illness persists for years to come. “Two years from now, how will I explain this? I’m going to say it’s because of COVID that I got infected five years ago?”

Nisrin Alwan, a public health researcher at the University of Southampton in the UK, and her colleagues found that many long-term Covid-19 patients are anxious and reluctant to disclose their condition for fear that it could jeopardize their work, their social interactions and more. . “Long-term Covid may soon become one of many chronic diseases that are neglected, poorly understood and rarely discussed,” concludes the Atlantic.

Source Atlantic