With my finger, I force myself to go through the list of symptoms in the journal I’m reading, one by one, to let them sink in. Chestpain. Breathing problems. Sore muscles. Loss of smell and taste. Lump-in-the-throat feeling. Muscle strain. Tingling. Temperature changes. Heavy limbs. brain fog. General fatigue.
I too initially had the inclination to think: oh well, ‘longcovid’, that will go away, I just have to get over it. Until I saw the first patients in my area who had it. The NRC-colleague with whom it felt like she’mononucleosis and a severe concussion at the same time‘ had. The biologist who still had palpitations a year after being infected with the slightest effort. The neighbor who is still sick at home.
How should that be done, reader Rense Buijen wonders, now that it is clear that corona is here to stay? About one in eight people still have complaints attributable to the virus three to five months after corona, a survey showed this month. thorough, Dutch analysis. ‘If one can get covid multiple times, won’t everyone eventually get it?’ Buijen therefore wonders. ‘Isn’t that just the end of our economy, when everyone will be home soon?’
It is clear from the anecdotes on the patient forums that there are people who only get corona post-covid syndrome after the second or third time. ‘I hear all kinds of experience stories’, says Alfons Olde Loohuis, general practitioner and medical advisor of aftercare organization C-Support. ‘People who get post-covid syndrome the first time and not the second time, while they are much sicker. And people who do have long-lasting complaints the second time around.’
But hard numbers are scarce. A just published study, among US veterans, is not cheerful. About 20 to 30 percent greater, the risk of postcovid syndrome after infection turned out to be number two for them. That led to alarming headlines – “Every time sick increases the risk of lung covid‘ – but the study has important ifs and buts. That’s how it was before omikron. And American veterans are a somewhat unusual group anyway.
It is promising that the number of new registrations at C-Support is currently lower than in previous waves, points out GP Sara Biere-Rafi, also involved in the aftercare organisation. Perhaps partly because the omikron variant causes fewer aftermath complaints. ‘These signals are there, although it is difficult to attach numbers to them,’ says Biere. A recent British study found that the risk of postcovid syndrome after infection with the omikron variant is perhaps 50 to 80 percent lower than after infection with the delta variant.
In addition, there is a cautious consensus that vaccination significantly reduces the risk of post-covid syndrome. Vaccination halves the risk, a study found huge analysis among 1.2 million Britons early this year. A other study, among Italian healthcare workers, found that the booster shot abolishes another few percent of the risk of lung covid symptoms. Even American veterans are at risk of post-corona syndrome smaller after vaccinationalthough there was ‘only’ a 15 percent decrease.
So many studies, so many numbers. The problem is that there are different definitions of postcovid, and maybe even multiple ‘postcovid syndromes’, each with their own clinical picture and idiosyncrasies. Sweetest four hypotheses are currently leading, says Olde Loohuis. Perhaps something in the body, such as a nerve or organ tissue, breaks during the acute infection. Perhaps a virus remains behind, hidden in, for example, the intestine. Perhaps the immune system is running wild, and ‘the alarm bells will still go off when the intruder has already left’, as Olde Loohuis says. Or perhaps the infection disrupts benign bacteria in our body, and that causes the misery.
brain fog. breathlessness. exhaustion. I think back to the list of symptoms, and the experiences of the people I know. There may be fewer than before, but it seems certain that new cases will continue to come. About 17,000 patients are now registered with C-Support. ‘And then we’ll probably only see part of it,’ says Biere. ‘These are very substantial numbers of people who drop out, cost society money, and for whom the care is not properly set up at the moment. That calls for answers.’