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It’s a low calorie argument.
It ignores how Covid bit healthcare workers and shut down businesses that will only be successful when the public feels safe. It avoids huge losses, even a 2% death rate, for tens of millions of Americans.
It also assumes that the lives of Minnesota’s 227,000 COVID patients, now out of isolation, have picked up where patients left off before the pandemic.
But do they have it? With 15,000 Minnesotans leaving the hospital, what happens to those who have battled COVID-19 … you know, when they get home? What happens to the even greater number of people who have recovered without ever going to the hospital?
In fact, thanks to a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, we know that the after-effects of hospitalization with COVID-19 can fall across a broad spectrum and offer many reasons to avoid getting sick in the first place. The authors, a team from the University of Michigan, interviewed 488 covid patients from a time 60 days after discharge.
The project looked at patients treated at 38 Michigan hospitals between March and July, and then recorded their life status after COVID-19. More than a third of those studied suffered from continuous personal disability 60 days after their battle with COVID-19. Many were still coughing (159), 65 of the recovering patients still could not taste or smell the food, and the post-Covid problems also extended to their daily financial and functional well-being.
Two months after ‘recovery’, 12% of patients surveyed in the Michigan study could not take care of themselves, 23% were short of breath walking up stairs, 39% had not returned to normal activities, and 40% were unable to work their jobs.
Some had lost their jobs when they were sick, but most were out of work because of their health.
Of those who still had a job, one in four needed to reduce their working hours, more than a third had suffered a financial blow and one in ten had seen their savings wiped out by illness and hospitalization. Almost half of the patients contacted said they were emotionally upset by the experience.
“These data suggest that the burden of COVID-19 extends far beyond hospital and far beyond health,” Dr Vineet Chopra said in a statement. Chopra was the lead author of the study and is chief of hospital medicine at Michigan Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Michigan. “The mental, financial and physical consequences of this disease on survivors,” he said, “appear to be significant.”
Minnesota health officials have also expressed a similar concern. After all, we’ve been so busy trying to stop COVID-19 that we haven’t started investigating what it left in its wake.
“The effects of this virus on people who are not even suffering from what they consider severe episodes of the disease may be long lasting,” Public Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said during a recent appeal to the hurry. “Puzzling phenomena can appear for weeks or more along the way, sometimes for months at a time.”
“We know everyone reacts differently,” said state director of infectious diseases Kris Ehresmann. “Some people regain their sense of taste and smell, while for others [the loss of those senses] lasts much longer. Some people will be what they call long haul carriers with this, and we just don’t know who these people are. No one knows who you will be, which is why we encourage people to take this seriously. “
“We are still exploring the long term effects of this situation,” said epidemiologist Dr Michael Osterholm on the same call. “I know of cases that are on 100% oxygen after having mild illness,” he said. “This is one more reason you don’t want to get infected with this virus.”
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