By Arthur E. Sowers
If you get COVID-19 and don’t die from it, then the next bad thing that can happen to you is that you may be seriously sick for the rest of your life.
Lots of reports have started coming out in the last two or three months that describe the experiences of some people who get what is now called “long COVID-19” or “long-hauler COVID-19.” Some of the worst problems are debilitating fatigue, serious breathing problems, brain fog that is so serious that some people have trouble thinking, and psychiatric disorders — including post-traumatic stress disorder — that otherwise make them unemployable. Up to now, there has been no basic statistic anywhere for these long haulers.
An extensive study of 3,762 people having long COVID-19 that has recently become available gives us a valuable start toward such a statistic. It is titled, “Characterizing Long COVID in an International Cohort: 7 Months of Symptoms and Their Impact,” and is available on the internet as a free download. It gives important numbers, and they are as follows.
The cases were 18-59 in age. Most cases were people from the USA and the United Kingdom. After one to three months, only 27% ever got well enough to go back to a normal work schedule. After seven months, another 45% had to arrange a reduced workload and still had residual symptoms. The rest (23%) never got back to work (data from the remaining 5% could not be used for technical reasons). Thus, about 68% of all serious cases of COVID-19 were still seriously sick after six to seven months.
The reason that the ones still sick after this time might be still sick for the rest of their lives is that the virus that causes COVID-19 is in the same taxonomic family as the viruses that caused the SARS pandemic (starting in 2003 in China) and the MERS pandemic (starting in 2012 in Saudi Arabia). I have now seen several references to medical reports describing serious symptoms from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus persisting at least 15 years after first becoming sick. Other recent articles with medical opinions on COVID-19 also suggested, based on earlier experience with SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that a fraction of COVID-19 patients might also suffer indefinite serious symptoms.
How does this apply to us in Delaware?
About 1,208 COVID-19 deaths to date in a total of about 80,500 COVID-19 cases is a death rate of 1.5%. In the UK, the National Health Services recently set up a program to begin studies specifically on long-haul COVID-19, and it has about 60,000 of these cases registered out of a total of about 3 million cases. This is the closest thing we have to a preliminary statistic for long-haul COVID-19. If 68% of the 60,000 long haulers in the UK never recover, then that will be about 41,000 or 1.4% percent of all cases of COVID-19. That 1.4% is close to the death rate for Delaware. Thus, if we have the same long-hauler rate as in the UK, then, in addition to 1,208 dead, there may be almost another 1,208 long-haul cases that may be sick permanently or indefinitely.
This is a “ballpark” preliminary estimate, but it shows that the bad outcome from this pandemic is not just the deaths but also the long-hauler serious disabilities. The total of these two worst outcomes is the sum, about 3%, of all who get serious symptoms.
I prepared this very preliminary estimate to further raise awareness of the fact that this virus is yet more dangerous than so far generally appreciated. I would also hope that our elected officials and people in our Division of Public Health might do something to develop a statistic to track long COVID-19.
Arthur E. Sowers, Ph.D., is a retired research professor from the School of Medicine of the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He resides in Harbeson.
