AMA: What doctors wish patients knew about COVID-19 reinfection (USA)

ahimsa

ahimsa

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
[Moderators - This article is about COVID-19 reinfection. I posted in the Long Covid forum because of the final section that talks about Long Covid. But please move it if it belongs elsewhere.]

What doctors wish patients knew about COVID-19 reinfection

https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering...wish-patients-knew-about-covid-19-reinfection
ama-assn.org said:
There is a connection with long COVID

“There are a lot of things that go into long COVID that we don’t really know about or are still learning … we can't really say what the implications are just yet,” Dr. Rouhbakhsh said. “We do think, however, you're less likely to get long COVID the less you are infected.”

“There are some studies that have suggested that the more times you get reinfected, the more likely you're going to develop long COVID,” said Dr. Crum, noting “there was a recent study out of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis that looked at this question. They studied over 5 million veterans and dependents through a VA system.

“What they looked at is people who got COVID-19 once or people who got COVID more than once, and they compared the medical outcomes of those groups,” she added. “And what we do know is the more times you get COVID, the more likely you are going to get a possible complication, be it lung complication, heart complication or mental health problems.”

“We should prevent reinfections as best as we possibly can because the more times people get infected, the more likely their health is going to suffer from medical conditions that can really involve any organ system in the body,” Dr. Crum said.
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“It can be problematic if you are reinfected,” Dr. Rouhbakhsh said. “We know from a pretty elegant study that was recently published in Nature Medicine that each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure and even mental health problems.”
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“What they looked at is people who got COVID-19 once or people who got COVID more than once, and they compared the medical outcomes of those groups,” she added. “And what we do know is the more times you get COVID, the more likely you are going to get a possible complication, be it lung complication, heart complication or mental health problems.”
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While I think avoiding getting covid-19 is a very good idea, there may be some 'correlation is causation' thinking here.

People who are very healthy may be more likely to have asymptomatic or very mild infections and so not even know they have been infected. So, when you look at Healthy person A, they report, and their health records report, that they have only been infected once. Unhealthy person B, already with kidney disease, is more likely to be more unwell and have a record of their infection. And, being more unwell, there is a greater risk of complications from the infection.

People who actually do have more infections than others are probably, on average, different to those who don't. It may be that they are working in low paid work with poor conditions (e.g. no protective equipment), or that they are working multiple public facing jobs (e.g. uber driver as a second job). They might live in a care home, or an institution of some sort. So, they are more likely to be old, be poor, have a poor diet, have existing medical conditions resulting from that poverty including substance abuse and have poor access to medical care. Therefore, it's not surprising that people who have more infections than others also tend to have worse health outcomes in general.

The studies may have accounted for some of those factors e.g. age, but I doubt that they accounted for them all.
 
3 years of progress in medical research: Long Covid may be associated with Covid.

We truly have nothing on those folks when it comes to pacing and radical rest. But truly this is radical progress, all things considered.
 
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