6 Reasons Why You Should Still Care About COVID

#3 We don’t understand the effects of long covid.

I get it.

We are all tired.

All of us.

I don’t know a single person who isn’t exhausted from hearing about masks, social distancing, rapid tests, or vaccines.

I also don’t know a single person who wants nothing more than for covid to no longer be a concern.

Infections are skyrocketing everywhere (not just in the US) due to omicron. This leads a lot of people to question if we shouldn’t just let the virus spread and see what happens, rather than trying to prevent it.

Like any strategy, there are advantages and disadvantages to this. The main advantage is we could return to a more normal life. This would benefit people’s mental health as a result of lifting the restrictions. Kids would be able to return to school without online learning interruptions. The economy would improve.

However, there are some potential disadvantages to this strategy. Here are five:

1. Everyone getting sick means shortages everywhere.

Even if restrictions are lifted, people who are sick with covid would still need to stay home. If everyone gets sick at the same time, there will be shortages of staff in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, and so on. In the end, these services will not be able to function fully, and could even not be able to function at all.

2. People are still dying from covid.

I don’t care if it’s old people or people with other conditions and neither should you. People are not disposable. This illness is affecting real people, with real lives and real families and friends who have to endure grief in a pandemic.

3. We don’t understand the effects of long covid.

No one seems to be talking about long covid or taking it as seriously as we should be.

The term long covid became popular in May of 2020 after people shared covid symptoms they had weeks, and months after being infected. The term became popular on social media and peer-reviewed papers soon followed.

Long covid patients have ongoing symptoms that persist for more than 4 weeks after their initial infection. The main symptom is fatigue but other symptoms include difficulty breathing, headache, depression, dementia, cough, chest pain, and many, many more.

Early in the pandemic, most studies included patients who were hospitalized. This lead to the belief that long covid was primarily happening in these patients.

However, more recent studies show that any patient can develop long covid, regardless of the severity of their initial infection. There are minimal differences in prevalence between people who were hospitalized and people who weren’t.

Interestingly though, being a woman and being in the age group of 35–49 years old increases your risk of developing long covid.

4. We don’t know what can happen with multiple infections.

This is relevant since a lot of people who are getting infected with covid-19 have been infected before. We don’t yet know the effects that multiple infections can have on us.

Are you more likely to get long covid if you are infected multiple times? We don’t know.

5. Getting infected later means more treatments and better vaccines.

It remains true that the more time passes until you get infected, the better for you. Treatments will keep improving with time, and better vaccines will be developed.

And, again, if we go back to long covid, the later you are infected, the better. Guidelines for treating and managing these patients are in their early stages. With time, our ability to properly diagnose these patients and provide them with appropriate care will only improve.

6. We don’t understand the effects of covid on our pets.

You know I’m a veterinarian when I can’t leave pets out of an article that doesn’t have much to do with them. Or does it?

Dogs and cats can test positive for SARS-CoV-2 after being infected by their owners. Most of the time, they remain asymptomatic. However, they can develop myocarditis, a general deterioration of their health. Cats can develop respiratory and gastrointestinal signs.

Still, we know enough about it to advise owners to interact as little as possible with their pets if they’re infected. But we don’t fully understand all the effects covid can have on pets, or how to treat them.

Although I completely understand (and relate) to this collective fatigue of the pandemic, we also need to be aware that every political and social decision has a myriad of consequences.

Long covid is a real issue that affects real people everywhere, and regardless of the severity of their covid infection. This is something everyone should be talking (and thinking) about.

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