The key takeaway of this study
is that in people who have coronavirus,
who may not actually be that sick
when they're acutely infected,
they may then go on to develop
long term symptoms of of Covid,
including fatigue
and loss of taste or smell.
It's common and it's common
not only in those
who are
sick enough to be in the hospital,
but also and those who are mildly ill
or really weren't sick at all.
They were diagnosed.
They had very, very mild symptoms,
but they didn't even ever require
being seen in a clinic
or in the emergency department.
This is something that's
seen across multiple geographic areas
among a diversity of populations.
Here in Seattle,
we have a pretty small cohort.
It is the longest cohort
in the United States.
And we did follow them out
to six to nine months.
And so I think that will
become available.
That type of data will become available
across the United States as other cohorts
are also are being followed up.
I think a comparison across the US
and across the world
will be really important
and they'll help us tease out the risk
factors for developing lung Covid.
And then then the question
is, what is driving this?
What are sort of the phenomenon
that are associated
with development of lung Covid?
Is this some sort of immune
activation, some sort of inflammation,
some sort of development
of autoimmunity
that's causing all of this?
So we have the blood samples
from these patients
will look at those samples
and try to tease some of this out.
There's always this phenomenon of post
viral illness that people do develop
that after they have
a viral infection, that some people would
then go on to develop lingering effects.
And this is what this post
Covid syndrome is looking like.
But up until now,
we've never had the numbers of people
where the proportions of people
who have had these types of long
lingering symptoms
and there hasn't been sufficient research
to understand what causes it
or to develop ways to treat it.
So I think that will all come over
the next couple of months to years.
But in the meantime,
the first thing to
do is just to quantify it
and to describe it.
That is the sense
I get from the young and healthy people,
this very young group,
that they get sick
and then they get better and they think
it actually isn't that bad of a disease.
And what's clear
is that you can do well initially,
but then you can over time, then
develop symptoms that are quite crippling
in terms of fatigue.
That's that makes it hard for you
to just do your normal activities
or not being able to taste
or smell, which is
it has a significant impact
on your quality of life.
I think that the key is to obviously
until the vaccine is available
for this age group,
and it will be months till that
they do need to be cautious
and to take the precautions to
to keep from getting Covid,
because it's not just
the short term symptoms,
but this potential long Covid.
These individuals were enrolled
as a part of the Harvey study,
which actually started back
in twenty sixteen to look at acute
RSV and influenza infection.
But when Seattle became
the initial epicenter
of the pandemic in the U.S.,
we quickly pivoted to look at COVID 19.
And so to date, we've been rolled
around 300 individuals
and to a longitudinal cohort.
And we're interested in looking
at kind of the clinical outcomes,
immune responses and long term
effects of COVID 19.
What we saw was that 30 percent
of our cohort reported a worsened health
related quality of life
compared to baseline,
so before they got sick.
And additionally, eight percent
said that they had faced impacts
to their activities of daily living.
And the most common one was being able
to perform their household chores.
A lot of this was attributed to fatigue.
So people being able to, you know, carry
heavy objects, unable to, you know,
stand or walk and assistance
for long periods of time.
And so, you know, with this,
I think we're going
to have to start looking into
what kind of help
these people are going to need to,
you know, overcome this fatigue
and to kind of get back
to their normal way of life prior
to when they contracted Covid.
I think one of the
strengths of our study is,
at least when we were writing this paper,
is that to our knowledge,
this presents the longest
follow up symptom assessment
as effects of COVID 19 post illness.
Our participants were
at a median of around six months
when they filled out the survey.
And the longest timeframe that we had
was up to nine months post illness.
The most common were fatigue
and loss of sensitive taste or smell.
We had about 14 percent
of participants say
that they were still
experiencing those symptoms.
And at that meeting of six
months, Kostelanetz,
we did actually see that
the proportion of individuals
who were reporting lingering symptoms
did increase with age.
So between the ages of 18 to 39,
it was about 27 percent.
And between 40 to 64, it was 30 percent.
And then 65 and older,
it was about 43 percent of individuals.
For this study, we surveyed
a population of our cohort
asking them if they were still
experiencing symptoms
from their acute infection
or if symptoms had
developed in the interim.
And we really just wanted
to see what was present.
And the
unique characteristic of this cohort
is that around 90 percent of them
were not hospitalized due to infection.
So they had a what we would consider
a mild or moderate illness.
I think our cohort
and this study specifically are unique
just because of that.
There's been a lot of focus
on hospitalized participants so far.
And we are looking more
at participants and folks
who are normally infected
and who did not have this large acute
illness.
So in terms of impact
on your average person
who wasn't hospitalized,
this shows that there are
potential consequences
that could last yonghua acute illness,
even if you don't go to the hospital,
even if you aren't really sick
from that COVID 19 infection,
a high proportion of our cohort
reported a worse quality of life
or worse and quality of life
after their infection.
And that's understandable,
given the burdens
that come with that illness.
And we understand
that there are a lot of
hardships right now, and
it seems that the symptoms from
and everything surrounding
their infection can add to that.
For the people
who experience really severe
long term effects,
they have massive impacts
to their quality of life to work,
to being able to function day to day.
And our study didn't
necessarily focus on that specifically,
but I think it's an area that needs
to be actively researched
with Youtube
setting up the long Covid clinic.
I think it's a start to
kind of assess widely
what it's like for those people, but
they're going to need a lot of support
to help overcome their symptoms.
And having symptoms
persist for six months
after an illness is pretty remarkable.