And don't forget the long-term health impacts for those that survive. This will have implications for years to come.
I think a study of a general population sample for mental health issues with or without a prior COVID-19 diagnosis would show how varying the COVID-19 patients experiences are vs how everyone else is fairing.
I’m not a scientist or a therapist so I don’t know the exact approach to use to do the comparison but I suspect it could be done.
COVID-19 is not a type of the flu, in the same way that a human is not a type of bat.
The Bible counts bats as birds.
Leviticus 11: 19
“And these you shall detest among the birds;a they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind, the little owl, the cormorant, the short-eared owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron of any kind, the hoopoe, and the bat."
https://survlivel.cultu.be/heron-stew
And ostriches are moderately popular now
> In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis. These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
Note that this study includes a group of COVID survivors who have recently recovered, and 2 control groups: healthy, age-matched participants, and a group of risk-factor matched control patients. It is published in JAMA Cardiology.
Obviously, this study doesn't say anything about truly long-term consequences of COVID, but that, IMO, is more because we haven't had time to reach "long-term" status yet. I would give it at least another 6 months to a year before making up my mind about the incidence of long-term consequences.
The major problem I see is that we currently watch the whole COVID-19 under amicroscope and discover a lot of horrible things. Actually, if you are a researcher, the only way to get attention is by finding horrible things. If we had done the same for epidemics in the past, would we have found horrible things as well?
Exactly. And it's insane to just assume there is long-term damage with no evidence whatsoever.
Also, it would likely be possible to say something about actual long-term damage if it existed by monitoring patients' recovery and extrapolating.
> There is one inevitable conclusion from these studies: COVID infection frequently leads to brain damage — particularly in those over 70. While sometimes the brain damage is obvious and leads to major cognitive impairment, more frequently the damage is mild, leading to difficulties with sustained attention.
> Although many people who have recovered from COVID can resume their daily lives without difficulty — even if they have some deficits in attention — there are a number of people who may experience difficulty now or later. One recently published paper from a group of German and American doctors concluded that the combination of direct effects of the virus, systemic inflammation, strokes, and damage to bodily organs (like lungs and liver) could even make COVID survivors at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease in the future. Individuals whose professions involve medical care, legal advice, financial planning, or leadership — including political leaders — may need to be carefully evaluated with formal neuropsychological testing, including measures of sustained attention, to assure that their cognition has not been compromised.
I think brain damage counts as "long-term damage," don't you?
> Patients with moderate head injuries fare less well. Approximately 60 percent will make a positive recovery and an estimated 25 percent left with a moderate degree of disability. Death or a persistent vegetative state will be the outcome in about 7 to 10 percent of cases. The remainder of patients will have a severe degree of disability.