Mild or moderate covid lasts for about two weeks in most patients. Yet, in other people who have had covid, long-term effects can cause lingering health issues.
Ann M. Parker, M.D., Ph.D., who specializes in lung disease and critical care points out in a John Hopkins Medicine article that the World Health Organization has developed a definition for post-COVID-19 condition (the WHO’s term for long COVID) – as coronavirus symptoms that persist or return three months after a person becomes ill from infection with SARS CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Those symptoms can include:
Fatigue
Shortness of breath
Cognitive problems (thinking and memory)
According to news agency Bloomberg, a Harvard study indicated that depression, anxiety, worries about the pandemic and other sources of distress prior to getting Covid-19 may increase the chance of developing persistent “long-haul” symptoms.
“Identification and treatment of biological pathways linking distress with long-term Covid-19 symptoms may benefit individuals with post-Covid-19 conditions or other chronic post-infection syndromes,” the investigators wrote. “Further research should investigate whether interventions that reduce distress help prevent or treat post–Covid conditions.”
Long Covid differs substantially from symptoms of psychiatric illness, and the results shouldn’t be misinterpreted as supporting a hypothesis that the condition is psychosomatic, or has no medical explanation, the researchers indicated. Among respondents who developed post-Covid conditions, more than 40% had no reported distress prior to catching the coronavirus.
Psychological distress has been linked to longer and more severe illness after respiratory tract infections, and it might drive the kind of immune activation and dysregulation implicated in long Covid, the Harvard researchers said in the study published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
Long Covid estimated to cost $3.7 trillion in the US alone, the Harvard study indicated while the Australian Financial Review said that the illness is costing the country’s economy an equivalent of $3.6 billion a year in lost output.
