Long Covid has a significant increase in risk of death, heart and lung problems
What have we learned from the pandemic? Understanding the risks of Covid-19, Alzheimer’s and other long-term conditions, and consequences for health?
I have laid out each hypotheses separately, but they are not disentangled. Among the many lessons of the pandemic, for me, has been how much more complicated and baffling disease severity and death is, even beyond the heartbreak it causes — how unpredictable the progression of illness can be, how simplistic it often feels to apply a single cause of death, and how random individual outcomes can seem.
The authors of the study say there needs to be continued efforts to prevent Covid-19 infections.
Yet we’ve wanted stories we drew from the pandemic to be straightforward and legible, no matter how messy and nuanced so many cases turned out to be. Do you think the death of a person with terminal cancer, who might have otherwise died because of a Covid-19 problem, is attributed to that? What about people who were suffering from Alzheimer’s, then died with a Covid infection? Are those people who had not been tested for Covid? How much responsibility do you take for a death if there are more than two or three conditions? And if Covid-19 was the fifth contributing cause, but the death would not have happened without that infection, are we supposed to call that dying “from” Covid or “with” Covid?
More than 200 signs and symptoms are associated with Long Covid. The health consequences can last for a long time.
Those with long Covid were more likely to experience cardiovascular events such as strokes, heart failure, and arrhythmias. The conditions of the heart were also common. The risk of pulmonary embolism more than tripled while the risk of COPD and moderate or severe asthma nearly doubled for those with long Covid.
Dr Mark C said that early evidence suggests that a large portion of people who experienced post-covid condition are doing so for more than two years.
The study shows that the coast is not clear if you get Covid once and don’t develop long it, or if you get acutely ill from it.