Views: 0 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2022-04-30 Origin: Site
The COVID-19 epidemic has entered its third year. It is conservatively estimated that more than 500 million people have been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide. How much does the medical community know about its sequelae? What are the sequelae discovered by medical research in the past two years? Should we be afraid?
First of all, various types of pneumonia generally leave various degrees of sequelae, and COVID-19 is no exception. But if someone tells you that he has had COVID and that he has recovered from a cold, it is not necessarily a lie. Sequelae is like this, it varies from person to person. Talking about any individual case is of little significance to our overall understanding of sequelae. Whether it is a case without sequelae at all, or a case that is serious enough to be forced to commit suicide, it will always exist.
Let's first look at some false information that is widely circulated on the Internet: many people have overcome the disease, but they cannot escape the sequelae. Among the first 40,000 people who recovered in the UK, about 1/8 died within 5 months of being discharged from the hospital, and about 1/3 were admitted back to the hospital for treatment within six months due to serious complications.
Terrible, right? ! But please look carefully. The first sentence of this paragraph is about sequelae, but what follows is
complications. Sequelae and complications are two completely different concepts. In fact, the original source of this news is a report in the New York Post in January 2021, and the source of this report is a preprint paper that has not been peer-reviewed. The most critical information in this paper is that the average age of the more than 40,000 people is 65 years old, and most of them are people with various basic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are common to the elderly. In other words, if these elderly people have the flu, they also have a very high probability of dying from complications. Obviously, complications and sequelae are two different fields of study.
So what can the best scientific evidence tell us about COVID sequelae? In August 2021, "Scientific Reports" under the "Nature" magazine published a meta-analysis paper on the research on COVID-19 sequelae. The researchers finally screened 15 high-quality papers published in 2020 from 18,251 papers. The research paper, which involved a total of 47,910 patients, ranging in age from 17 to 87 years. The conclusions drawn are briefly summarized as follows:
80% of people will experience at least one sequela within weeks to months of recovery from COVID-19, with the five most common sequelae being: fatigue (58%), headache (44%), and attention deficit (27%). %), hair loss (25%), and dyspnea (24%). In addition, it is also confirmed that the common sequelae, as well as loss of smell and taste, joint pain, etc., a total of 55 kinds of sequelae that can be confirmed. But unfortunately, this paper does not mention how long these sequelae will last, how likely it is that they will accompany them for life, and other data that people will be very concerned about.
