There is still no test to diagnose long Covid and also no cure. It’s the fallout of the pandemic that is fast becoming a mounting health concern. Ufrieda Ho reports.
Ufrieda HoThere is still no test to diagnose long Covid and also no cure.
“I think I’m in trouble,” came the message through to professor Veronica Ueckermann one evening during the first surge of Covid-19 in South Africa in the winter of 2020. The nursing sister had numerous comorbidities, including a raised BMI, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. When her symptoms didn’t get better, the hospital just wanted to have her medically boarded because they couldn’t be sure when she would be well enough to work again.
It's so difficult to know exactly what we are looking at, but what is sure is that it is something that it is a dysfunctional, debilitating entity.“There are three components, but we don’t know what each brings to the table. There is a genetic component because we see long Covid in certain populations much more than in others. And then there is also thrombo-inflammation.
“We need our immune response, also our inflammation response, but we also need this to be curbed once an insult to the body is gone. It seems like there is chronic, ongoing dysregulation but we also can’t non-specifically suppress an immune system,” she says. There are other associated costs for people who cannot work or are performing sub-optimally trying to work while feeling unwell. Children affected by long Covid do worse at school and lose interest in their sports and other activities that they used to enjoy, she says.on a dedicated long Covid clinic at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. As far as we could establish, such specialised long Covid clinics are very rare in South Africa.
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Still many unknowns, but long Covid is real and deserves support for rehabilitation, says expert | LifeThere is still no test to diagnose long Covid and also no cure. It’s the fallout of the pandemic that is fast becoming a mounting health concern. Ufrieda Ho reports.
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