New study highlights effects of long COVID

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Researchers, clinicians, and patients have gathered in Victoria for what was probably the first conference in Australia devoted entirely to the issue of long COVID.

Transcript

00:00 So this is probably the largest survey to date. There are other research projects going

00:06 on, one in Sydney called ADAPT, but this was a survey of 12,670 people, thereabouts. Going

00:13 back to January 2020, who'd been infected with COVID. They also had a group of people

00:17 who hadn't been infected with COVID for comparison. And they were able to track them and survey

00:24 them to see how many had persistent symptoms beyond three months, any symptoms at all.

00:29 And what they showed was that the risk was about a 14% proportion of people who had persistent

00:39 symptoms over these three years. But when you alluded that, in fact, it was changing.

00:45 So if you'd got COVID back in January 2020, your chances of getting persistent symptoms

00:51 were about 25%, one in four. And that drops down to about nearly just a little bit over

00:56 one in 10 now. It still means though that there could be, just in Victoria alone, this

01:03 was a Victorian survey, there could be 400,000 people with persistent COVID symptoms. And

01:09 there are lots of unusual things that were surprising things in this survey. First of

01:13 all, we tend to think that long COVID occurs in people who have severe disease. Now, there's

01:19 no question that severe disease increases your risk of persistent symptoms, often with

01:25 organ damage. But only 8% of people had severe COVID in this sample. 92% had mild to moderate

01:34 symptoms and 40% were aged between 40 and 59. So this was not necessarily an elderly

01:41 population who were vulnerable. This was you and me.

01:45 So does this mean that long COVID is a bigger problem than we thought it was?

01:50 Well, it tends to go along with other surveys, but some people have said it's 3%, some people

01:54 have said it's 15%. So 10%, 12% is what other surveys tend to be showing. But it's

02:01 significant. I mean, it's a very large number of people. And about one in four of those

02:05 people with long COVID were saying that it has affected their lives. They're not living

02:09 life the way they want to, and some were quite severely disabled.

02:12 So what were some of the key concerns that came out of this conference?

02:16 Well, one of the, the lack of an easy explanation for what's going on. So the people had brain

02:23 fog, they had fatigue, they had weakness, breathlessness, exertion, insomnia, headaches,

02:30 migraine being made worse, asthma being made worse. The concern is getting help to these

02:35 people. Many of them will get better of their own accord. We heard about research and there's

02:41 research going on in Sydney and the Kirby Institute which suggests there may be interesting

02:45 medications that could be used for some of these people, but it's not just one disease.

02:50 The question is equipping general practitioners to be able to deal with it. Because these

02:53 people were not going to see endocrinologists and cardiologists. They were going to see

02:58 GP specialists. And GPs are, you know, they don't have the infrastructure around them

03:05 to be able to deal with this. You need exercise specialists, you need psychologists. A lot

03:09 of people had depression and anxiety, either because they were fed up with the symptoms

03:14 and worried about them, or maybe the brain effects themselves were causing psychological

03:18 issues. People get nutritional problems, their microbiome changes. You need a lot of professionals

03:24 coming together and general practice isn't equipped for that, even if the spirit's willing.

03:30 Did you get a sense from the health professionals in the room during the conference that they

03:34 are very worried about this situation with long Covid?

03:37 Well, they're worried enough that they got together about it and they're worried about

03:42 the dimensions of the problem. And there's a lot of people out there who are experiencing

03:47 this in silence. So not everybody, far from everybody in this survey, had gone to see

03:52 anybody about it. They were living with these symptoms quietly by themselves, thinking,

03:56 well, maybe this is normal. Nobody's got any help for me. What have you. So there's just

04:01 this worry that this is a dampener on a large proportion of the population. And of course,

04:08 politicians don't want to talk about it. We all want Covid to be over. But there's this

04:12 legacy of Covid and there's more Covid around the corner, unfortunately.

04:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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