Advertising
Supported by
The count accounts for less than 1% of all coronavirus-related deaths, but shows it is possible to die from persistent symptoms after infection.
Send a story to any friend.
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift pieces to offer per month. Everyone can read what you share.
by Pam Belluck
Long Covid has or contributed to at least 3,500 deaths in the United States, according to a death certificate investigation through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study, published Wednesday, would be the first national review of whether long covid or similar terms appear in official U. S. death records. It found that such words were only recorded in a small proportion of the more than one million deaths linked to coronavirus infection. , the researchers and other experts said the findings added to the growing popularity of the severity of long-term post-covid medical problems. Maybe.
“It’s not one of the main reasons for death, but, given that this is the first time we’ve looked at it and that for a long time covid is a disease we’re learning more about day by day, the main takeaway is that it’s imaginable that someone will die and, for a long time, covid played a role in their death. ” said Farida Ahmad, a fitness scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, who led the study.
Long Covid is a complex constellation of symptoms that can last for months or longer and can affect virtually any organ system. Some of the most debilitating post-Covid symptoms are respiratory problems, core problems, excessive fatigue, and cognitive and neurological problems.
The researchers looked at the death certificate in the state and Washington, D. C. , dated January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2022. They discovered 1,021,487 certificates that included a COVID-19 diagnostic code as the underlying or contributing cause of death. Of these, 3,544, or 0. 3% of the total, indexed long Covid or terms such as post-Covid syndrome, chronic Covid or long-distance Covid.
Ms. Ahmad and experts not involved in the studies said the number of prolonged Covid-related deaths in the study is almost underestimated. It took time for the condition to be identified and known through doctors and other medical providers. And the study couldn’t come with a new diagnostic code for prolonged Covid because it wasn’t yet used to report deaths in the United States, the researchers said.
“This new study is vital to raise a concern, but it needs to be followed up through more definitive work,” said Dr. Jeffrey Martin, chair of the department of clinical epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. , which was not involved in the studies.
“Historically, the death certificate has been incomplete in explaining how a user died,” said Dr. Martin, who advised that long-term studies include interviews with doctors and patients’ families and evaluating their medical records.
The study found that more death certificates talked about covid for a long time after 2020 and that the condition is likely indexed to the death certificate in the weeks or months following a spike in covid cases, Ahmad said.
The study found that some of the prolonged covid patterns such as age, gender, race, and ethnicity differed from those seen in deaths caused by the initial infection. For example, while blacks and Hispanics had higher death rates from initial coronavirus infection than non-whites Hispanics, those teams did not have higher death rates than those for long Covid, according to the study.
The researchers cautioned that the difference could be due in part to systemic disparities that have resulted in less access to physical care for black and Hispanic patients, who likely wouldn’t have gotten the correct diagnoses for the long covid. The study said it was also conceivable that, because black and Hispanic patients died at higher rates of initial illness than white patients, they may have “fewer COVID-19 survivors to revel in long-term conditions. “
Almost 57% of covid-related long-term deaths were in other people over the age of 75. Nearly one-third of death certificates that mentioned covid for a long time indexed the underlying or number one cause of death as a non-covid-related condition, such as core disease, cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s just scratching the surface, it’s a first look,” said David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, who was not involved in the study.
He said the study basically seemed to capture the deaths of other people who suffered an initial severe coronavirus infection and survived that phase, but then suffered organ injuries and other serious complications. of others who had devastating post-Covid symptoms.
Another report released Wednesday, through the Documenting Covid-19 project, presented a snapshot of long-term Covid-related deaths through the 2020 and 2021 death certificate search in Minnesota, New Mexico and a few other places. This report, conducted through Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock, a public records discovery, found that 18 of Minnesota’s 28 long Covid-related deaths those years involved others over the age of 80 and that most patients had worked blue-collar jobs. and didn’t have a college degree. In New Mexico, about one-third of the thirteen long-time Covid-related deaths were of others under the age of 60, with some being frontline or essential workers, according to the report.
Experts who evaluated the CDC study cautioned that it was an incomplete picture of long-term covid mortality and the increased number of patients from the disease, which according to the Government Accountability Office affected between 7. 7 and 23 million people in the United States.
“It’s a vital thing to explore and study, but you can’t use it as a replacement to say, ‘Oh, well, a long time, covid is rarely that bad because look at how few deaths there are,'” Dr. Putrino said. “We don’t measure the damage that covid has done a long time through deaths alone. “
Advertising