- In the study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, researchers looked at medical records of more than 73,000 people across the United States whose coronavirus infections did not require hospitalization. Between one and six months after becoming infected, those patients had a significantly greater risk of death — 60 percent higher — than people who had not been infected with the virus.
The research, based on records of patients in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, also found that nonhospitalized Covid survivors had a 20 percent greater chance of needing outpatient medical care over those six months than people who had not contracted the coronavirus.
I've mentioned a few times I'm absolutely petrified of long-haul diseases The headline, while accurate, is only accurate-ish. The study NYT is citing PDF WARNING! is all old white men, who as a function of being old mean weakened immune system. I would have loved if the study broke down by age group and if this was across all ages or not. Also doesn't take into account if someone is pre-diabetic and this just exacerbated the problem to full-blown Diabetes II or if the strain it caused on an already weakened heart that just wasn't yet detected or causing enough problems to finally show itself. I really wish both the NYT article and actual journal article went more in-depth. In the actual study, the word "age" only appears once, and that's describing it as a covariate. Half of the people in this study were 67 or older. That's hardly representative of the population as a whole. Long Covid is terrifying, but prove it can be terrifying for the 18-45 year olds and maybe they'll start caring. That's where most cases are right now (and the younger ones beyond that, but they have little to no autonomy and essentially no vaccine availability and are at the whim of policy, so I'm not including them in my rant), make them care, and we'll start doing better. Keep telling them there are no or unknown short- or long-term risks, for the most part they won't give a single fuck.That group had a median age of 67, was 90 percent male and had a somewhat larger proportion of white patients and a somewhat smaller proportion of Black patients.
The researchers also could not say if people had underlying health conditions and whether their new symptoms were direct effects of their coronavirus infection, corollary effects of medications they were taking to treat some of the symptoms, stress from other pandemic-related problems or other influences.