Coronavirus could have longterm consequences for your health. Here’s how, experts say
The coronavirus pandemic has potential long-term consequences on your health and the health care system at large, experts say.
As a result of the pandemic, “in-person patient visits” have decreased 50% to 75% for physician practices, according to The Los Angeles Times.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services directed doctors to postpone elective procedures in March to “preserve equipment” and “free up our healthcare workforce to care for the patients who are most in need.” Late last month, CMS reversed course with guidelines to resume such surgeries under phase one of President Donald Trump’s Opening Up America Again plan, McClatchy News previously reported.
Canceled surgeries, a drop in hospital visits and delayed appointments could have an impact on your health.
“One of the key concerns that practitioners in particular are having is related to the backlog that is piling up,” Ellen Nolte, professor of health services and systems research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Vox, “and the impacts this will have on medium — and long-term outcomes, in particular for people with chronic conditions.”
Dania Palanker, an assistant research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown’s Health Policy Institute, told Vox she’s concerned people who have been diagnosed with diabetes or heart disease possibly won’t be able to get an appointment with a new doctor. “You can’t delay those appointments for a few months,” she said.
As a result of delaying hospital visits and emergency departments not being able to see them, people with urgent conditions like heart attacks or strokes could be worse off than usual, Dr. Anupam Jena, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, told Time.
Patients who have canceled screenings could also go longer without getting a diagnosis for cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, which would impact their prognoses, Jena told Time.
The inequality gap in health care is also likely to get bigger, Dr. Chethan Sathya, an assistant professor of surgery and pediatrics at New York’s Cohen Children’s Hospital told Time. “As the unemployment rate rises because of this, people are going to have less and less access to health insurance,” he said.
As for direct long-term health consequences, Dr. Shu-Yuan Xiao, a pathology professor at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, told ABC News that those who had a mild version of coronavirus should get better “with no lasting effect.”
Patients who need ventilators and were in the intensive care unit are more likely to have damage to their lungs and “to develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a severe lung condition in which fluid collects in the lungs’ air sacs,” according to ABC.
Since COVID-19 is a new infection, there hasn’t been research or studies into the trajectory for severe cases, according to Vox.
“The difficulty is sorting out long-term consequences,” Joseph Brennan, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, told Vox. Brennan worries that there could be long-term consequences, including heart damage, mental health and neurological effects, and lung scarring.
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 11:31 AM with the headline "Coronavirus could have longterm consequences for your health. Here’s how, experts say."