The article headline came up different than what it was on CNN. But basically the part that has me really worried is that up to 30% of children who become infected by covid / delta may become covid long-haulers. And that is very alarming.
We've been diving into Covid long hauler data and our findings have been consistent with others in that, it seems to affect the body for about 3 months before symptoms fade for most patients.
First here's a great synopsis of what "long Covid" really is:
“Long COVID” is a term used to describe presence of various symptoms, even weeks or months after acquiring SARS-CoV-2 infection irrespective of the viral status [8]. It is also called “post-COVID syndrome”. It can be continuous or relapsing and remitting in nature [9]. There can be the persistence of one or more symptoms of acute COVID, or appearance of new symptoms. Majority of people with post-COVID syndrome are PCR negative, indicating microbiological recovery. In other words, post COVID syndrome is the time lag between the microbiological recovery and clinical recovery [10]. Majority of those with long COVID show biochemical and radiological recovery. Depending upon the duration of symptoms, post COVID or Long COVID can be divided into two stages-post acute COVID where symptoms extend beyond 3 weeks, but less than 12 weeks, and chronic COVID where symptoms extend beyond 12 weeks
Risk factors:
Follow up of patients recovered from COVID identified a few factors which are commonly associated with development of long COVID. The risk of long COVID is twice common in women compared to men [9]. Increasing age is also a risk factor and it is found that patients with long COVID are around four years older than those without [9]. Presence of more than 5 symptoms in the acute stage of illness is associated with increased risk of developing long COVID [20]. Symptoms most commonly associated with long COVID include fatigue, headache, dyspnea, hoarse voice and myalgia [20]. Presence of co morbidities also increases the risk of developing post COVID syndrome. Even those with mild symptoms at initial presentation were noted to develop long COVID.
Long COVID is the collective term to denote persistence of symptoms in those who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.WE searched the pubmed and scopus databases for original articles and reviews. Based on the search result, in this review article ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
This article mainly looks at hospitalized people and their long covid, but in the general population, we are seeing symptoms fade for
most people, because most people do not fall in the risk group stated above.
Some articles are tagging long hauler covid as being at about a 10% prevalence in the population that contracted covid.
Overall, approximately 10% of people who’ve had COVID-19 experience prolonged symptoms, a UK team estimated in a recently published Practice Pointer on postacute COVID-19 management. And yet, the authors wrote, primary care physicians have little evidence to guide their care.
As Their Numbers Grow, COVID-19 “Long Haulers” Stump Experts
But when we start actually slicing and dicing this into days (or weeks) post infection, we see that there are drop offs (at least in the data we're looking at) in symptoms from 60 to 90 to 120 days. I really like the way this analysis breaks it down.
We analyzed data from 4,182 incident cases of COVID-19 in which individuals self-reported their symptoms prospectively in the COVID Symptom Study app1. A total of 558 (13.3%) participants reported symptoms lasting ≥28 days, 189 (4.5%) for ≥8 weeks and 95 (2.3%) for ≥12 weeks.
Analysis of data from the COVID Symptom Study app reveals fatigue, headache, dyspnea and anosmia as key attributes of long COVID, with those experiencing five or more symptoms during the first week of being at increased risk of prolonged disease.
www.nature.com
And while there are reports of Covid harming organ tissue, it seems to get better as time goes on--or the difference between microbiological recovery and clinical recovery--as long as the person isn't in one of those risk groups with the comorbid conditions.
As an aside, this study suggests that Epstein–Barr virus (EBV)
We found the prevalence of long COVID symptoms to be 30.3% (56/185), which included 4 initially asymptomatic COVID-19 patients who later developed long COVID symptoms. Next, we found that 66.7% (20/30) of long COVID subjects versus 10% (2/20) of control subjects in our primary study group were positive for EBV reactivation based on positive titers for EBV early antigen-diffuse (EA-D) IgG or EBV viral capsid antigen (VCA) IgM. The difference was significant (p < 0.001, Fisher’s exact test). A similar ratio was observed in a secondary group of 18 subjects 21–90 days after testing positive for COVID-19, indicating reactivation may occur soon after or concurrently with COVID-19 infection. These findings suggest that many long COVID symptoms may not be a direct result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus but may be the result of COVID-19 inflammation-induced EBV reactivation.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients sometimes experience long-term symptoms following resolution of acute disease, including fatigue, brain fog, and rashes. Collectively these have become known as long COVID. Our aim was to first determine long COVID prevalence in 185 randomly surveyed...
www.mdpi.com
So, is this scary? Yes. But, there are still a lot of things we don't know about this virus. Don't worry too much. We have been finding that most people that are healthy tend to recover. It might take a while, but they do recover. Just like the myocarditis that the vaccines were causing, researchers found that the organ damage was only temporary for a majority of the young men who had this side effect.
But also, don't be dumb. The delta variant is here, so maybe consider social distancing, masking, and avoiding large gatherings.
www.cnn.com
www.businessinsider.com
www.cnn.com
www.newsweek.com
