Axios
Apr 26, 2021 7:15 PM ET
One study, published Thursday in Nature, found that, between one and six months post-infection, people whose coronavirus cases didn t require hospitalization had a 60% higher risk of death than people who hadn t been infected with the virus, per the New York Times.
These non-hospitalized COVID patients also had a 20% greater chance of needing outpatient medical care over those six months post-infection. Their symptoms spanned across organ systems and also included mental health issues.
Some could become chronic health conditions requiring lifelong treatment.
“We found it all,” Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of the research and development service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and an author of the study, told the NYT. “What was shocking about this when you put it all together was like ‘Oh my God,’ you see the scale.
COVID-19 survivors including those not sick enough to be hospitalized have an increased risk of death in the six months following diagnosis with the virus, researchers report.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, it has become clear that many survivors even those who had mild cases continue to manage a variety of health problems long after the initial infection should have resolved.
The researchers have catalogued the numerous diseases associated with COVID-19, providing a big-picture overview of the long-term complications of COVID-19 and revealing the massive burden this disease is likely to place on the world’s population in the coming years.
People With Severe COVID-19 Have Higher Risk Of Long-Term Effects, Study Finds
By Laurel Wamsley
April 22, 2021
The potential lasting effects of COVID-19 infection are many and people with more severe initial infections are at greater risk for long-term complications, according to a study published Thursday in
Nature.
The study, thought to be the largest post-acute COVID-19 study to date, sheds more light on the lingering effects of COVID-19 known as “long COVID.”
Ziyad Al-Aly and his colleagues used the databases of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to examine health outcomes in more than 73,000 people who’d had COVID-19 and were not hospitalized, comparing them with nearly 5 million users of the VA health system who did not have COVID-19 and were not hospitalized.
Long-haul COVID-19 symptoms common, rise with severity of illness
By (0)
For many people who have had COVID-19, effects of the infection continue long after recovery. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
For people who ve suffered through a bout of COVID-19, their misery is too often not over. New research shows that a wide variety of long-haul symptoms are common, and the risk rises along with the severity of their case of COVID-19.
In what may be the largest such study to date, the findings show that beyond the first 30 days of illness, substantial burden of health loss spanning pulmonary and several extrapulmonary [non-respiratory] organ systems is experienced by survivors of the acute phase of COVID-19, according to a team led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, of the VA St. Louis Health Care System, in St. Louis, Mo.
Intensive Care Unit nurse Subramanya Kirugulige prepares a bed for an arriving COVID-19 patient at Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago in December. A large study has found that people with severe initial cases of COVID-19 tend to be at greater risk of more health problems later on. Scott Olson/Getty Images
toggle caption Scott Olson/Getty Images
Intensive Care Unit nurse Subramanya Kirugulige prepares a bed for an arriving COVID-19 patient at Roseland Community Hospital in Chicago in December. A large study has found that people with severe initial cases of COVID-19 tend to be at greater risk of more health problems later on.