Media reports describe the indisputable, if uncomfortable, circumstances we follow in the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic: In addition to hundreds of thousands of Americans who died from the disease, thousands of those who ‘recovered’ developed a long Covid , a syndrome characterized by symptoms such as cough, headache and body aches, fatigue, loss of taste and smell, and ‘brain fog’ that may linger – or disappear and reappear – after the main symptoms of Covid-19 fade. It can occur even in those with initially mild cases of Covid-19.
An early estimate suggests that up to 10% of those recovering from Covid-19 may be so-called long-throwers who need ongoing care for their persistent symptoms.
The U.S. health care system and infrastructure are too overwhelmed to respond to essential needs to take into account the broader implications – and opportunities – of long Covid. But one promising asset is yet to be harnessed in the fight against Covid-19: long-term care providers. Spouses, children, parents, and friends monitor long-term symptoms and changes, manage medical treatment and intervention, and document the details because their loved ones are living with a number of symptoms, some mild, others unwell.
advertisement
Caregivers are those who can report the lasting loss of odor or mild cough. They mention the mild fever that appeared a week after a negative test. They can provide information that is essential for understanding this enigmatic syndrome.
In addition to studying long shifts, researchers should also study their caregivers. Such work can have the triple impact. Not only would questioning caregivers provide more accurate information about long-term care workers, but it could also create a better understanding of the disease itself by allowing researchers to compare the effects of long-term caregivers side by side with those of their caregivers, who were probably also exposed was after the coronavirus but had a different experience of the disease. A third far-reaching impact of the inclusion of caregivers in Covid-19 research is what will be learned about caregivers themselves, whose experiences are largely misunderstood.
advertisement
Being a caregiver can have a dramatic impact on the health and well-being of an individual – just as many factors as income, educational achievement and place of residence, the so-called social health determinants that public health experts study. By comparison, there is only a nominal investment in the health and well-being of the caregiver.
The pandemic offers a unique opportunity. It is seldom possible to remove other social determinants from the equation and directly determine how care affects well-being. But due to the episodic nature of the long Covid, it may now be possible.
Longitudinal studies can trace the experience of caregivers along with their care recipients; look at increased stress in the caregiver along with the causes; monitor how caregivers maintain their own health and whether they delay medical treatment; or identify mental health disorders such as depression and substance abuse in the caregiver if and when they occur.
Prior to the pandemic, 53 million people in the United States served as unpaid caregivers alone, usually providing a variety of care to family members or friends. If 10% of the Covid-19 cases linger in long Covid, there are possibly 2.7 million (as I write this) more people serving as caregivers. Recording the experience of even a fraction of these caregivers could inform the health of the population for decades to come, because everything we learn about long-term caregivers will bear fruit for the millions who go to loved ones with physical disabilities, dementia and other chronic diseases. care.
To do this, government and corporate leadership will be taken. The National Institutes of Health has launched length studies on the effects of exposure to Covid-19. These, along with other future government studies, could be expanded to assess the long-term effects of Covid-19 on family caregivers. Given the potential decades of support that caregivers provide, it would be a missed opportunity not to think about ways to maximize this research investment.
In addition, long-term clinics should involve and support caregivers from the patient’s first visit. Studies of long covid should collect information from caregivers as well as from patients, to ensure that all symptoms, even the slightest, are studied.
Across the board, the mental health of Americans has been affected by the pandemic, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that unpaid caregivers experience three times the suicidal thoughts and drug use as their non-caring counterparts during the pandemic. We will probably see a similar effect on long-term caregivers over time.
Just as miserable and deadly as acute cases of the virus can be, long Covid can be both debilitating and terribly discouraging as it continues indefinitely. Our efforts to treat or cure this post-viral syndrome are currently limited, but we will one day wish we had learned everything we could have learned during this time, including what we can do from long-term caregivers.
Jennifer Olsen is the CEO of the Rosalynn Carter Institute of Caregivers.