A frightening study has shown that almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients in the United Kingdom return to the hospital within five months — and up to one, in eight, die of complications from the illness.
Researchers at the UK’s Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics found that out of 47,780 people discharged from the hospital, 29.4 per cent were readmitted within 140 days.
Of the total, 12.3 per cent ended up dying, it added.
Respiratory disease was diagnosed in 14,140 of the COVID cases after discharge, with 6,085 of the diagnoses in patients who had no history of respiratory conditions.
The mean age of study participants was 65 years.
Many people who suffer long-lasting effects of the coronavirus develop heart problems, diabetes and chronic liver and kidney conditions, according to the report.
The research also found a higher risk of problems developing in various organs after people younger than 70 and ethnic minorities were discharged from the hospital.
“People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in and dying. We see nearly 30 per cent have been readmitted, and that’s a lot of people. The numbers are so large,” study author Kamlesh Khunti said.
“The message here is we really need to prepare for long COVID. It’s a mammoth task to follow up with these patients and the NHS is really pushed at the moment, but some sort of monitoring needs to be arranged,” added Khunti, a professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University.
The study — which Khunti described as the largest of people discharged from a hospital after being admitted with COVID-19 — found that survivors were nearly 3½ times more likely to be readmitted, and die, in 140 days than other outpatients.
Khunti said the researchers were surprised that many people were readmitted with a new diagnosis, adding that it was important to make sure people were placed on protective therapies, including statins and aspirin.
“We don’t know if it’s because COVID destroyed the beta cells which make insulin and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,” he said.
“We’ve seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they’ve cardiac problems and liver problems,” Khunti added. “These people urgently require follow-up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins.”
The number of confirmed cases worldwide on Tuesday passed 100 million, according to data from Johns Hopkins University data, just over a year since the first cases of the then ‘mysterious’ new illness were reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
During the past 12 months, the pandemic has forced governments to order shutdowns, curfews, travel bans and other public health restrictions to try and stem the spread of infections.
Economies have been hard hit and inequalities of all types have been exacerbated.
More than 2.1 million people around the world have died from COVID-19, and more than 55 million people have recovered from the disease.
Despite the development of more effective treatments for the contagion and the roll-out of vaccines across dozens of countries, mutant strains of the virus recently detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have created uncertainty.
