A few comments on “Long Covid”, people who are experiencing...

A few comments on “Long Covid”, people who are experiencing severe symptoms after many weeks/months. Please see

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02598-6for the full article, highlights below;

Enduring effects

In the first few months of the pandemic, as governments scrambled to stem the spread by implementing lockdowns and hospitals struggled to cope with the tide of cases, most research focused on treating or preventing infection.

Doctors were well aware that viral infections could lead to chronic illness, but exploring that was not a priority. “At the beginning, everything was acute, and now we’re recognizing that there may be more problems,” says Helen Su, an immunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “There is a definite need for long-term studies.”

The obvious place to check for long-term harm is in the lungs, because COVID-19 begins as a respiratory infection. Few peer-reviewed studies exploring lasting lung damage have been published. Gholamrezanezhad’s team analysed lung CT images of 919 patients from published studies1, and found that the lower lobes of the lungs are the most frequently damaged. The scans were riddled with opaque patches that indicate inflammation, that might make it difficult to breathe during sustained exercise. Visible damage normally reduced after two weeks1. An Austrian study also found that lung damage lessened with time: 88% of participants had visible damage 6 weeks after being discharged from hospital, but by 12 weeks, this number had fallen to 56% (see go.nature.com/3hiiopi).

Lung scans from a 50-year-old show that damage from COVID-19 (red) can improve with time — but many patients have lasting symptoms.Credit: Prof. Gerlig Widmann, Dr. Christoph Schwabl, Dr. Anna Luger - Dpt. of Radiology, Innsbruck Medical University.

Symptoms might take a long time to fade; a study2 posted on the preprint server medRxiv in August followed up on people who had been hospitalized, and found that even a month after being discharged, more than 70% were reporting shortness of breath and 13.5% were still using oxygen at home.

Evidence from people infected with other coronaviruses suggests that the damage will linger for some. A study3 published in February recorded long-term lung harm from SARS, which is caused by SARS-CoV-1. Between 2003 and 2018, Peixun Zhang at Peking University People’s Hospital in Beijing and his colleagues tracked the health of 71 people who had been hospitalized with SARS. Even after 15 years, 4.6% still had visible lesions on their lungs, and 38% had reduced diffusion capacity, meaning that their lungs were poor at transferring oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from it.

Please also see this from the BBC;

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54106272

Extract;

“According to the Covid Symptom Study app, which tracks people's symptoms regardless of whether they had a test, about 300,000 people in the UK have reported symptoms lasting for more than a month, and 60,000 people have been ill for more than three months.”

There seems to be increasing medical evidence that COVID-19 is an insidious disease, these “Long Covid” patients often exhibit mild symptoms which gradually get worse. I am sure Mesoblast RYONCIL will help a heck of a lot of people.

It’s thought at the moment that a vaccine will only be partly effective, Dr Fauci will accept a 50% effective hit rate on any vaccine. The economic ramifications of this pandemic makes me shiver. These people are unable to work, therefore are removed from the economic recovery increasing the need for therapeutic treatments to repair scarring in the lungs and other organs. This, for our Meso’s could be an unbelievable game changer.

A big thank you to all MSB’ers on Hotcopper for your contributions and apologies if this has been covered already. This information is provided for general use and is not to be considered financial advice as always dyor.

All the best.

M