(ANSA) – ROME, 02 JUL – “Current numbers and trends indicate that Long Covid is the next public health disaster in the future” for the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that over 114 million Americans have been infected with Covid-19 up to March 2021 and “we can estimate at least 15 million Long Covid cases resulting from this pandemic”. This is written by the authors of an article published in the New England Journal of medicine (Nejm), underlining that these patients “will have to face a difficult and tortuous experience with the health system, in light of the complex and ambiguous clinical condition”.
Long Covid is not a condition for which objective diagnostic tests or biomarkers are currently available as is the case for other conditions caused by Sars-Cov-2, for example: blood clots, myocarditis, multisystem inflammatory disease, pneumonia. Rather, it consists of a series of symptoms that can last for months and can affect a number of organs and often worsen after physical or mental activity. The pathophysiology is also unknown: there is no lack of hypotheses, all plausible but lacking in evidence, involving persistent live viruses, autoimmune or inflammatory sequelae. “To understand why Long Covid represents an impending catastrophe, just look at similar post-infectious syndromes”, such as that caused by the Epstein-Barr virus “that could foreshadow the suffering of patients in the months following the infection”, write the authors of the Covid Collaborative USA and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston. The long Covid was treated “as a new unexpected phenomenon.
But it isn’t. Equally surprising was the medical community’s difficulty in recognizing it as a legitimate syndrome that deserves a thorough investigation. “Due to the lack of support, many groups were born among these patients, who have an average age of 40. of online support, which count hundreds of thousands of subscribers. (ANSA).
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