“Long COVID” exposes long-term challenges

The difficulties in containing the epidemic have been made clear by the rising reports of people becoming “long COVID.”

According to experts, long-term COVID will probably lead to increased demand on social and medical resources, a declining labor force, and an economic crisis.

UNDERESTIMATED PERCENTAGE

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines post COVID-19 disease, also known as long COVID, as an illness that affects people who have a history of probable or proven SARS-CoV-2 infection, has symptoms that extend for at least two months, and cannot be explained by an other diagnosis.

According to the WHO, 10 to 20 percent of COVID-19 patients still have mid- and long-term symptoms like fatigue, breathlessness, cognitive dysfunction, and other symptoms that generally affect daily functioning. The illness seems to affect women more often.

According to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine in the United States, in 2020 and 2021, an estimated 17 million people in the WHO European region met the WHO criteria for a new case of long COVID with symptom duration of at least three months.

In the first two years of the pandemic, over 145 million people worldwide experienced one of the three COVID symptom clusters: cognitive difficulties, shortness of breath, and exhaustion with physical discomfort and mood swings. Today, millions of people are still experiencing negative effects from COVID-19 on their health and way of life, according to Christopher Murray, the IHME’s director.

Nearly one in five American people who formerly had COVID-19 are thought to now have extended COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An investigation into post-COVID-19 symptoms among hospitalized versus non-hospitalized individuals two years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection was published in the prestigious medical journal JAMA Network Open earlier this month.

According to Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, we may have been undercounting long COVID in light of studies like this one from Spain. By stating that “what we’re not good at yet is working out the complexities of long COVID after different variants, such as delta,” he highlighted the knowledge gaps in long COVID.

PERMANENT IMPACT

Long COVID is “devastating” the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of people, wrecking havoc on health systems and economies, as WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned. In order to address the “very serious” crisis, he urged nations to start “immediate” and “sustained” efforts.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the summer of 2022, there would be about 2.5 million economically inactive Britons due to long-term illness, up from about 2 million in the spring of 2019.

An ONS official told Xinhua that this represented the greatest level of inactivity among the chronically ill since statistics have been kept in 1993. It had been mainly declining since just before the year 2000, but it began to increase once more in 2019 and has since surpassed its peak from the late 1990s.

“While long-term COVID symptoms may not be the primary cause of the working-age population’s increased long-term sickness, the pandemic’s broader impact on health is nevertheless likely to be a significant component in increasing long-term sickness,”

According to a recent poll by the British Trades Union Congress, 16 percent of people with lengthy COVID were working less hours and 20 percent were not employed.

A paper by Brookings Metro that examined the effects of extended COVID on the job market was released in January 2022. Since there is little information on the condition’s prevalence, the research relied on several studies to arrive at a cautious estimate: approximately 16 million working-age Americans (those between the ages of 18 and 65) currently have lengthy COVID. Of those, between 2 and 4 million are unemployed as a result of extended COVID, with the cost of those lost wages alone being anywhere between 170 and 230 billion dollars each year.

While the worsening health of the British population is an emergency in its own right, with at least 5.5 million people in Britain waiting for hospital treatment, it has serious repercussions for the economy, the Financial Times reported.

LINGERING PANDEMIC

“The virus is now firmly in charge of the battleground in our armaments race against it. The virus hasn’t gone away just because we’ve stopped caring, Altmann recently told Xinhua.

Contrary to its name, the SARS-CoV-2 virus affects millions of individuals worldwide and not only causes acute respiratory disease but also has the potential to induce acute and post-acute extrapulmonary sequelae in almost every organ system, including acute and chronic kidney disease.

According to the research, “long COVID will reverberate with us for decades and have broad and deep social, economic, political and global security ramifications, long after the COVID-19 epidemic abates” due to the scope and the chronic nature of numerous of its sequelae.

Altmann stated, “I wish we could just elevate the awareness levels a little bit higher,” recommending people to wear masks and “take it a wee bit seriously” when they are on public transportation, in a theater, or at the opera.

According to Harvard Medical School, there are various reasons why the most vulnerable communities and groups are more susceptible to extended COVID, including less access to preventive treatment and increased risk for preexisting diseases.

Diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma, heart disease, and cancer are conditions that are known to increase the risk for severe COVID-19 illness, which in turn increases the risk for long COVID, and are more prevalent in certain populations in the United States.

Over 98 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million deaths associated with it have been reported in the United States overall. Public health specialists claim that the underfunding of long-term care, primary care, and public health departments is a contributing factor in the virus’s disproportionate impact on the United States. Because of this, some individuals were more susceptible to COVID and lacked trust in the medical professionals who advised them to keep a distance from others, wear masks, and be immunized.

David Rosner, a professor of public health and social history at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told the Guardian in May that “this is more than just a failure of a health system.” It represents the fallacy of American ideology.