Long COVID Has Contributed to More Than 3,500 U.S. Deaths

Long COVID—a condition with symptoms ranging from respiratory to neurological, from crushing fatigue to chronic pain—can be debilitating. And in some cases, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Long COVID may even be fatal. From January 2020 through June 2022, Long COVID contributed to more than 3,500 deaths in the U.S., according to death-certificate data analyzed by NCHS researchers. About 0.3% of death certificates that listed COVID-19 as an underlying or contributing cause of death also mentioned Long COVID, for an age-adjusted death rate of 6.3 per 1 million people. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “The good news is that…by and large, post-COVID is not a fatal condition,” says Dr. Aaron Friedberg, an internal-medicine physician who treats Long COVID patients at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (and who was not involved in the new research). “Most people do get better with post-COVID.” But Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, an assistant professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a Long COVID researcher (who also wasn’t part of the NCHS report), fears the problem may be worse than it looks on paper. Read More: Long COVID Isn’t the Only Post-Viral Illness In the report, researchers looked at death certificates that mentioned COVID-19 as a contributing or underlying cause of death, then zoomed in on those that explicitly mentioned Long ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news