Coronavirus: Long Covid the next challenge for doctors – Who is at risk

Her imperative for the State to turn to the creation of long covid clinics points out in an interview with Fm Agency and on Tania H. Madouvalou’s show Professor of Pulmonologydirector of the pulmonology clinic of the University of Thessaly Konstantinos Gourgoulianis.

The coronavirus will end at some point, but the patients who will need follow-up will be many and they will remain, he says characteristically, to then emphasize that necessary equipment and a team of many specialties are needed, in order to build structures in each tertiary hospital, which will have to function for several months, maybe even years after the end of the pandemic.

In the professor’s clinic, a long covid study is being carried out which finds data that is consistent with other international ones and was published in May in the “Journal of Personalized Medicine”.

We have treated 2,000 patients so far, says Mr. Gourgoulianis, who is also the coordinator of the study. “However, our study concerns 145 patients who had a severe illness, in the period before vaccines. When these people left the hospital and for some time, about seven in ten reported having extreme fatigue and muscle aches, about one in five reported a loss of taste or smell, and the symptoms were more severe in women. About 1 in 10 after hospitalization has a serious burden on his mental health. Fatigue is a symptom that continues even a year later», write down.

Vaccinated – unvaccinated 1-0

To the question of whether the long covid differs from vaccinated to unvaccinated Mr. Gourgoulianis replies that there is still no reliable data. Scientists, he explains, simply know that after vaccination, people who were hospitalized had milder disease and therefore “we expect to have less severe long covid in the patients who were vaccinated and got sick”.

Regarding some scientific findings that even asymptomatic people can manifest severe symptoms of long covid, the professor states that statistically those who show the typical symptoms are those who have entered the hospital, have been hospitalized for several days, and have entered the ICU. “However, there are studies that report long-term damage in people who have gone through it lightly, but it’s a smaller percentage of those patients.”

We will have a good summer

Regarding the evolution of the pandemic, Mr. Gourgoulianis expresses the optimism that we will have a good summer considering that this wave will imitate the corresponding waves in countries that took the measures earlier, such as Portugal.

“It’s reaching its peak these days and will start to taper off slowly. I think that August will be very good and we will see from September-October when we will shoot indoors how it will be. I hope then that we will have new vaccines aimed at the new strains».

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