While much ink has been spilled about the communicability of COVID-19, and people have made a point of focusing on the disease’s frightening 3.4% mortality rate, a less-discussed aspect of the disease is what recovery entails. Since the disease’s outbreak began in China, the majority of recoveries are from there, where research shows that recovery from the disease comes with some caveats.
COVID-19 can result in a serious loss of lung functionality. Doctors in Hong Kong found that, in the first wave of discharged patients who had recovered from the disease, roughly two or three out of twelve had twenty to thirty-percent reduced lung functionality.
This manifested in people finding that when they walked quickly, they’d be left gasping for air. The novel coronavirus causes a respiratory disease, so this isn’t an unusual turn of events: one could expect such reduced functionality, given the nature of the virus. While it’s still early to ascertain the long-term affects of the disease, scans of recovered patients reveal a troubling reality.
In scans of nine recovered COVID-19 patients, it appears as though the disease could cause lasting organ damage. This is surprising, as initially it seemed as though the disease shared many characteristics with SARS. However, given that this is a novel virus, scientists are still learning about it every day.
So far, COVID-19 has infected some 128,000 people, and of them, 70,000 have recovered from the virus. However, in light of these findings, those people could be suffering from organ damage from the disease, and their fight could be far from over.
The disease itself causes symptoms of fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Understandably, it takes more than just flu symptom relief to combat the disease, contrary to some popular misconceptions. The respiratory illness is a cousin of SARS and MERS, both of which are also caused by coronaviruses.
Notably, the disease causes significantly more noticeable symptoms in older people or people with underlying conditions. In this way, it is very similar to SARS.
However, this doesn’t mean that young, healthy people should disregard health and safety guidelines. Due to the mild nature of the symptoms in younger people, some could contract and carry the disease without realizing it. This could lead to them inadvertently sickening many more people. This then increases the likelihood that older people or immunocompromised people could contract it.
