(Newer)
A year after the World Health Organization first declared COVID-19 a pandemic, researchers are still beginning to understand the disease – and why some patients still have symptoms months after being infected. According to a new study, many coronavirus “long-term vehicles” experienced only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all during the initial infection. The study analyzed the medical records of 1,407 people in California who tested positive but were never admitted to the hospital. According to researchers, there are probably many more undiagnosed cases of long COVID. “We know that some of the long-distance symptoms appear much later than two months,” says co-author, dr. Natalie Lambert, the New York Times. “So there is a potential for a wide range of long-distance symptoms that they are not going to associate with COVID.”
The study found that just over a quarter of patients, 59% of women, reported symptoms more than 60 days after infection. Lambert also interviewed more than 5,000 people contacted by the Survivor Corps website for long-distance guards, NBC News reported. She says that although more research is needed, early findings suggest that symptoms initially come in waves, with fever, chills and gastrointestinal symptoms occurring in the early stages, such as in patients who do not take long distances, followed by heart problems and blood pressure in about 15 days, and symptoms such as mouth sores and “COVID toes” appear a week later. After 60 days, researchers say, symptoms such as cough, muscle aches, headaches and increased heart rate appear in clusters that can change from day to day. The study did not look at ‘brain fog’, which according to doctors is also a common long-distance symptom. (Read more coronavirus stories.)