As the number of worldwide confirmed coronavirus cases climbs towards 1 million, the number of recoveries is thankfully more than four times the death toll. But medical experts told that COVID-19 can cause severe long-term damage to the lungs, heart, brain and other organs – and that for some patients, these complications may be permanent.
Out of more than 950,000 cases of coronavirus so far across the globe, over 202,000 people have recovered, while more than 48,000 have died. However, clinicians have pointed out that some COVID-19 survivors have developed acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) – a severe condition that, for the worst-affected patients, can last for the rest of their lives.
The doyen of medical journals, The Lancet, was one of the first to sound the alarm, publishing a report in February showing that 29 percent of a group of patients in Wuhan whom the researchers tracked between mid-December and early January had got ARDS.
A similar report by the British Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, published in The Sunday Times on March 15, found that some 17 percent of intensive care patients whose treatments they analysed developed the syndrome. In addition, a few days before the British doctors released their findings, medical researchers in Hong Kong found that, out of a small study of 12 patients who left hospital after recovering from the coronavirus, two or three had diminished lung function.
‘The damage you can have is for a lifetime’
The coronavirus has been treated “as though it’s life and death – if you have the right medical care you can survive – but some survivors are having issues that are lingering”, noted Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. “Because of how serious the ARDS is, the damage that you can have for that is for a lifetime.”
“Large numbers of ARDS survivors are not able to go back to work,” added Onjen Gajic, a critical care specialist at the Pulmonary Medical Department of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
ARDS is not a new phenomenon – it was first described in 1967. Common causes include pneumonia, sepsis and serious influenza cases. Symptoms include extreme shortness of breath, and feelings of exhaustion and confusion. As well as the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, it can damage other vital organs by preventing the lungs from supplying them with sufficient oxygen.
With coronavirus, patients can suffer from “inflammation and the build-up of fluid in a significant portion of their lungs, which limits their ability to get enough oxygen into their blood to support normal organ function”, explained Julie Fischer, an associate research professor of microbiology and immunology at Georgetown University.
“The most severely ill patients require mechanical ventilation to keep their tissues supplied with oxygen until the inflammation subsides,” Fischer continued. “Both the inflammation and the mechanical ventilation required to help patients survive can damage the delicate tissues of the lung that are involved in oxygen transfer, which may affect the function of the lungs even after recovery from acute COVID-19 disease.”
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