the COVID-19 It seems to be starting again. But beyond the disease, we must also deal with its long form: the long Covid. A hard-to-understand model, explained Dr. Sandra A. Freehofer, Chair of the WADA Board of Directors and a member of the CDC Advisory Board.
For many, Covid-19 is a disease that must be fought at the “T” moment, but not everyone is lucky enough to get rid of it in a few weeks.
Among the people who survive it, there are already those who are infected for a long time and therefore feel the symptoms of the disease over a period of several months.
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COVID-19 and its long form
This long Covid is raising questions for scientists and researchers from all walks of life. Sandra A. Fryhofer is back on this topic in an interview with Infectious Diseases News, a medical journal dedicated to all topics related to infection.
According to her, there is still a lot we don’t know about SARS-CoV-2 and the disease that the virus causes. Despite all the studies in recent months, and despite laboratory-developed vaccines, Covid-19 really remains a mystery and researchers don’t know why some patients develop symptoms that persist for weeks or months after the outbreak.
For her part, she was called in to treat many patients suffering from this type of disease. It found that the most frequently recurring symptoms consistent with this list were cough, joint and muscle pain, chest pain or even headache, as well as brain fog, fatigue and shortness of breath.
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Very diverse symptoms
However, this is not a hard and fast rule. In fact, the range of symptoms associated with the prolonged form of Covid-19 is much broader.
But in addition to this variety of symptoms, there is also the issue of temporality that poses a problem. Not all people with the long-term type of illness develop symptoms after infection. In some patients, they do not appear until several weeks after contracting the disease.
Even more surprisingly, some doctors noticed their symptoms were getting worse, but other patients literally developed new illnesses unrelated to the ones they had after contracting the virus.
John T. Brooks, the CDC’s chief medical officer, goes further. In the same article, he explained that some patients who developed the long form of the disease … originally only had mild symptoms. Even more intriguingly, others were even asymptomatic, and therefore asymptomatic, cases.
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There is no hindsight of Covid’s long-term consequences
But above all, it is the repercussions of Covid’s long illness that are cause for concern. While symptoms may persist, in some cases they also have consequences for the metabolism. Such as the onset of diabetes, depression or chronic anxiety.
Even Ziad Al-Ali, director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Head of Research in St. Louis, conducted a study on the topic. A study of more than 86,000 people with Covid-19.
After focusing on patients who survived the disease, they found several serious health problems. Problems such as respiratory failure, nervous system disorders, cardiovascular disorders or even digestive problems.
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Disease is still a mystery
Problems to which I add sleep disturbances, anxiety-related disorders or even increased stress.
And all the anxiety is precisely there. At present, no one has yet been able to determine the exact origin of these disorders, or even why some of them have persisted for long periods of time. The most plausible theory is that the virus triggered an inappropriate immune response resulting in persistent inflammation, but researchers have not yet been able to prove this.
But above all, what is worrying is that at the moment, no one knows the long-term effects of this type of disease.
