COVID-19 News: Terming Individuals With Receding Symptoms And Testing Negative As Recovered Could Be Scientifically Misleading! Is One Truly Recovered?

COVID-19 News: Just like literally everything that we were told since the COVID-19 infections first broke out in China, nothing that we know then as a result of all the misinformation fed to us by the unscrupulous Chinese and their faked data or the initial misinformation from the clueless and incompetent WHO is really valid today. From the drugs that they claimed worked, to the pathogenesis and progression of the disease to even what constitutes so called recovery.


 
The US CDC and the medical boards in EU are all using the terms recovery and also the criteria for recovery based on what the Chinese perpetrators of this catastrophic pandemic formulated in their public medical guidelines (and not the actually enforced medical guidelines!).
 
Is a person who meets the criteria for recovery really recovered from the COVID-19 disease?
 
More and more it is slowly emerging that there might not be such a thing as recovered patients including for those who merely experienced mild symptoms or none at all as more studies and research are reporting about long term health complications and also more evidence is showing that there could be dormant viral loads still in the human host body still, gradually causing a whole new set of chronic medical problems. (though it must be noted that more detailed studies are needed to verify all this.).
 
Even in China that has been concealing a lot of data and the real scenario of what is happening on the ground level now has its own media reporting on many such incidences of recovered patients developing a whole range of medical issues. In one English state owned newspaper, the Global Times, it was reported on the 4^th of August that ninety percent of 100 recovered COVID-19 patients who received treatment in a Wuhan hospital still have lung damage and 5 percent of them have been quarantined again after positive test results. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1196716.shtml
 
A facebook group in the US called Survivor Corps that has thousands of members who had so called ‘recovered ’are reporting online of a wide range of medical issues that they are still struggling with, weeks and months after being labeled as “recovered.”
 
In another new study published in the Journal of Medical Virology, researchers have identified a pattern of longer-term symptoms likely to be experienced by people who were hospitalized with the COVID-19 infection.(mind you here we are only focusing on hospitalize COVID-19 patients who recovered, we have yet to even touch of those who experienced mild symptoms initially and those that are symptomatic, we will covering that in detail in another article.)
 
In the study the symptoms observed in recovered hospitalized COVID-19 patients include fatigue, breathlessness, psychological distress including problems with concentration and memory and a general decline in quality of life. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.26368
 
Certain patients, particularly those who had been in intensive care, had symptoms associated with cases of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
 
T hese research findings provide the first detailed insight into problems facing patients recovering from COVID-19 in the UK.
 
Associate Clinical Professor Dr Manoj Sivan from the University of Leeds and a Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, supervised the research project. He told Thailand Medical News,"COVID-19 is a new illness and we have very little information on longer term problems in individuals after discharge from hospital."
 
He added, "The emerging evidence is that for some, the road to recovery may take months and it is vital specialist rehabilitation is on hand to support them. This research gives an important insight into patient needs, and that will help shape services in the community."
 
Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and Consultant with Leeds Teachings Hospitals NHS Trust, Dr Stephen Halpin said, "This research follows our previous work of predicting COVID-19 patients' long-term needs based on previous coronavirus outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. The health problems are similar but on a larger scale given the number of people affected."
 
The study team involving multidisciplinary specialists from the University of Leeds, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust and Leeds Beckett University followed 100 people recovering from COVID-19, four-to-eight weeks after being discharged from hospital in Leeds.
 
The survivors were divided into two groups: those who had become critically ill and needed intensive care 32 people were in this category; and those who were treated on a ward without needing intensive care 68 people were in this category.
 
The patients were contacted by a member of the hospital's rehabilitation team and asked a series of questions about their recovery and symptoms they were still experiencing.
 
The common most prevalent symptom was fatigue. More than 60 percent of people who had been treated on a ward reported fatigue, and one-third of them described it as moderate or severe. For patients who had been in intensive care, 72 percent reported fatigue. Of those, more than half said it was moderate or severe.
 
The next most common symptom was breathlessness. People in both groups said they had feelings of breathlessness which had not existed before they contracted COVID-19. This was higher in the group that had been the most ill, the intensive care group versus those who had been treated in a ward ie 65.6 percent versus 42.6 percent.
 
Another most prevalent symptom were neuropsychological issues. The research survey found that almost one quarter of the people who had been on a ward and just under a half of the people who had been in intensive care had some of the symptoms of PTSD.
 
The researchers said, "PTSD symptoms are a well-recognized component of post- intensive care unit syndrome caused by a variety of factors including fear of dying, invasive treatment, pain, delirium, inability to communicate, weakness, immobility, and sensory problems and sleep deprivation."
 
Interestingly more than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of patients in the intensive care group and just under half (45.6 percent) of the other group said their overall quality of life had deteriorated.
 
The study team said that the rehabilitation needs of patients who did not require hospital care need to be further investigated and they are working on understanding this in future research.
 
Simply just looking at this study of ‘recovered’ hospitalized COVID-19 patients, is it correct to be labeling these patients as recovered in the first place?
 
We at Thailand Medical News will be doing a sequel to this article as we are awaiting for the soon to be published works of two team of researchers who have just completed their studies on long term health issues in those COVID-19 patients that had only mild symptoms or none initially.
 
For the latest COVID-19 News, keep on logging to Thailand Medical News.
 
Read also: https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/post-covid-fatigue-irish-study-claims-44-70-percent-of-recovered-covid-19-patients-will-suffer-from-severe-fatigue-irrespective-of-disease-severity