Assessment of Prolonged Physiological and Behavioral Changes Associated With COVID-19 Infection, 2021, Radin et al

This is an interesting brief article, comparing data from wearable monitoring devices from people who had a respiratory illness and tested positive to Covid-19 with data from people who had a respiratory illness and tested negative to Covid-19.

With the issues around testing, it would have been nice to have some comparisons with people who had no respiratory illness. Still, they got some pretty clear results.

I hope this sort of work is being done to compare people who get Covid-19 and develop a post-viral fatigue syndrome with people who get Covid-19 and don't develop a post-viral fatigue syndrome.

 

What struck me about those results, compared to the changes I think we experience when in good or bad patches of our illnesses, are the relatively small changes.

Figure A is the resting heart rate, and the difference is just an increase of around 2 beats per minute. Whereas, when I'm worse, the difference in resting heart rate can be tens of beats per minute(e.g. 60 to 100). I would be an outlier, way off the chart. I do think the resting heart rate is a measure that should be used more in investigations of ME/CFS.

Figure B is the sleep duration, and the Covid-19 people slept for about an hour more than normal for a couple of weeks during the acute Covid-19 illness. Whereas, if my illness is worse, I can sleep for a couple of hours more, and my son can sleep for a lot more hours than that. It's interesting to see the prolonged effect on sleep length variability in the Covid cohort, although in absolute terms, that variability isn't large (mostly plus or minus 20 minutes).

Figure C is the step count, and there is a definite drop off of steps during the acute phase of the Covid illness. For many of us, of course, that lower step count is sustained.