As of April 2022, more than 500 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection had been reported around the world. Do you recall the beginnings of the pandemic? The fear, the deaths, the bereavement? We have yet to be free of COVID-19, despite fighting it for more than two years.
According to a new study, the coronavirus may be here to stay, and like so many other things that are slightly more difficult for women, this virus appears to afflict the fairer gender harder. ‘There are no effective pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatments for people with protracted COVID’, as per the study.
Even after a year of infection and hospitalisation, only one out of every four people can claim to have fully recovered. This suggests that the virus is here to stay and is on its path to becoming a widespread disease. ‘Without appropriate treatments, extended Covid could become a very common new long-term illness,’ one of the study’s co-leads, Christopher Brightling of the University of Leicester, stated.
Women were also shown to be 33% less likely than men to fully recover in the research of over 2,300 people. The study looked at the health of 807 people who were discharged with Covid from 39 British hospitals between March 2020 and April 2021, then followed up five months and a year later to see how they were doing. Only 26% of patients reported complete healing after five months, according to a research published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal, and that number rose only modestly to 28.9% after a year.
‘The limited recovery in our study from five months to one year following hospitalisation across symptoms, mental health, exercise ability, organ damage, and quality of life is startling,’ said Rachel Evans, study co-leader at the National Institute for Health and Care Research. The most common long-Covid effects were fatigue, muscle discomfort, poor sleep, physical slowness, and dyspnea.
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