The Story of a Long Covid-like Disease: Implications for Disease, Health, and the Epidemic-Restriction Paradigm

A second hypothesis is about the indirect effects of pandemic restrictions: not just missed medical care but social isolation, anxiety and unemployment, which can worsen a wide range of conditions, as well as, potentially, suicide and homicide and even car accidents and overdoses, to the extent they each deviated from historical patterns.

A third hypothesis is that Covid-19 infection does harm to the body that can linger after recovery for some people — not just in what is conventionally called long Covid, but also in other ways, by disturbing the function of various organ systems. (Damage to the cardiovascular system has been one particular area of research focus.) Akiko Iwasaki, an Immunology Professor at Yale told me that they don’t understand the whole spectrum of disease yet. We are still learning.

Even though many cases turned out to be messy and nuanced, we want the stories we drew from the epidemic to be straightforward and legible. If someone has terminal cancer, but died six months before he might have otherwise because of a Covid-19 infection, to what do you attribute that death? What about those whose Alzheimer’s, obesity or anxiety worsened in isolation, then died with a Covid infection? Did anyone not have been tested for Covid? There are two or three or five conditions that contribute to a death. What if Covid-19 was the fifth contributing cause but the death wouldn’t have happened without it?

The study examined claims data for 13,435 adults with Covid and 26,870 without it during a year. The long Covid group experienced increased mortality due to accounting factors present prior to infections.

People with long Covid were more likely to have cardiovascular events including arrhythmias, stroke and heart failure. Pulmonary conditions were also common. The risk of COPD and moderate or severe asthma almost doubled for those with long Covid.

Dr. Mark C said that early evidence suggests that a majority of people who were previously exposed to the infectious agent, are doing so more than two years later.

The study proves that Covid isn’t like you have Covid once and then afterwards if you don’t get acutely ill or if you don’t develop long Covid from that first infections, that the coast is clear.