Symptoms of Covid-19 can linger for many weeks and even months. However, doctors have yet to understand the cause and patterns.
Doctors "don't understand" why some patients have symptoms of Covid-19 that last for as long as weeks or months, emergency care physician Dr. Ron Elfenbein said during an interview with CBS News.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), patients with mild cases of Covid-19 recover in about two weeks. However, some who are considered as "long-haulers" suffer from the symptoms longer, even after initially improving.
Based on a recent Dutch study, a vast majority of individuals manifesting coroanvirus symptoms said they still suffer health problems such as extreme fatigue or shortness of breath nearly three months later. The study investigated 1,600 people with coronavirus symptoms, 91% of whom were never hospitalized. Their average age was 53.
"These people reported that they still had symptoms — shortness of breath, cough, headache, intermittent fevers, brain fog, trouble concentrating, chest pain, palpitations, things like that — that continued for months and months and months," Elfenbein said on CBSN.
"The scary part about this is that when they looked at these people, 85% of them considered themselves healthy before this happened, and afterwards, only 6% reported they were healthy, so these are like everyday people that had no medical problems."
According to the group that commissioned the study, almost half of the patients said they could no longer exercise and about 60% said they find walking difficult now.
"We really don't understand the science behind this and we don't really understand the pathophysiology why this is continuing to go on," Elfenbein said.
"Could it be that it's your immune response that's causing that? Or could it be that you have some late reactivation of the virus still inside your body, meaning that it's still in there and reactivating from time to time to cause these symptoms?"
Elfenbein noted that doctors have yet to find out the cause, and "the big problem" is they do not know how to manage the ongoing symptoms.
Five days of exposure
Another study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, found that people with coronavirus symptoms may only experience the symptoms five days after their exposure to the virus.
Findings showed that people would manifest coronavirus symptoms 5.1 days after their initial exposure. It was the median length as incubation periods vary. Some people show signs of illness within two weeks.
“Based on our analysis of publicly available data, the current recommendation of 14 days for active monitoring or quarantine is reasonable, although with that period some cases would be missed over the long term,” said Justin Lessler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior author of the report.
Lessler’s team reported that for 98% of people who acquire symptoms of COVID-19, the transmission of the virus can take place within 11.5 days of exposure. The researchers suggest that for every 10,000 individuals quarantined for 14 days, only 101 would manifest symptoms upon release from quarantine.
Second wave
The possibilities of a second wave of coronavirus are “very real,” according to the chief scientist of the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said that while strict health measures were able to slow the transmission of the coronavirus, its resurgence is possible as economies reopen.
“We don’t know if it will be a second wave, a second peak or a continuing first wave in some countries, it (the infection rate) really hasn’t come down that much at the time of reopening and so all of these possibilities are very real,” she said on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”
