The answer to that is a definite “maybe.” Many people are able to clear a SARS-Cov-2 infection after two to four weeks. Some, of course, never clear the infection, and become part of the Covid-19 mortality statistics. Of the survivors, after they clear the infection, are there any lingering effects that could pose problems? For many, the answer is “yes.”

An article appearing in the May 2021 issue of The Lancet did a study of what has happened to people six months after they contracted Covid-19. By that time, the virus was long gone from their bodies, but the aftereffects, known as sequelae, for many, were still a problem. The paper is titled 6-month neurological and psychiatric outcomes in 236,379 survivors of COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study using electronic health records. With that many test subjects, the statistical power of this study is great, meaning that a lot of weight can be attributed to its findings and conclusions.

People who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 were compared against two groups of matched controls. The first group of controls in the dataset were people diagnosed with influenza during the same period as the Covid-19 patients. The second group of controls were people who had been diagnosed with a respiratory infection that included but was not limited to people with an influenza infection.

The researchers were looking to see whether the Covid-19 patients were diagnosed with neurological or psychological outcomes more often than were the controls who had been diagnosed with influenza or some other respiratory disease, within a six-month span. Hazard ratios (HR) were computed for each patient and then averaged for each outcome. HR is the chance of a particular outcome for the Covid-19 cohort divided by the chance of that same outcome for the control cohort.

Outcomes that were recorded:

• Intracranial hemorrhage
• Ischemic stroke
• Parkinsonism
• Guillain-Barre’ syndrome
• Nerve, nerve root, or plexus disorders
• Myoneural junction or muscle disease
• Encephalitis
• Dementia
• Mood, anxiety, or psychiatric disorder
• Substance use disorder
• Insomnia

Out of this list Guillain-Barre’ syndrome had the lowest HR at 1.21. Covid-19 patients were 21% more likely to be diagnosed with Guillain-Barre’ syndrome than were the controls diagnosed with influenza and, with a HR of 1.27, 27% more likely to be diagnosed with Guillain-Barre’ syndrome than the controls with a respiratory infection.

At the other end of the spectrum, myoneural junction or muscle disease had the highest HR at 5.28, meaning this outcome was 5.28 times as likely to appear in the Covid-19 cohort than in the influenza control cohort. The Covid-19 cohort also had a HR of 4.52 compared to the respiratory infection controls. The HRs for all the other neurological and psychological outcomes fell somewhere between 1.21 times and 5.28 times.

Overall, 33.62% of Covid-19 patients were diagnosed with at least one of the neurological or psychological outcomes. For those patients who had been hospitalized, the percentage was 38.73%. For those admitted to the intensive treatment unit (ITU), the percentage was 46.42%, and for those diagnosed with encephalopathy, the percentage was 62.34%.

Hazard ratios were consistently greater for the Covid-19 patients than for the influenza controls, except in the cases of parkinsonism and Guillain-Barre’ syndrome. When compared to the respiratory infection controls, the hazard ratios were significantly greater for the Covid-19 patients in all cases.

Bottom line: Even if Covid-19 were to be wiped off the face of the earth—the way polio has been defeated by the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines, we are going to be dealing with the sequelae of Covid-19 for a long time. People who contracted polio as children suffered the disease’s crippling sequelae for the rest of their, most likely shortened, lives.

BIO:

Allen G. Taylor is a 40-year veteran of the computer industry and the author of over 40 books, including Develop Microsoft HoloLens Apps Now, Get Fit with Apple Watch, Cruise for Free, SQL For Dummies, 9th Edition, Crystal Reports 2008 For Dummies, Database Development For Dummies, Access Power Programming with VBA, and SQL All-In-One For Dummies, Third Edition. He lectures internationally on astronomy, databases, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He also teaches database development and Crystal Reports through a leading online education provider. For the latest news on Allen’s activities, check out his blog at wwwallengtaylor.com or contact him at allen.taylor@ieee.org.