The country needs to prepare for what’s next after omicron, thousands of cases with the debilitating and long-term condition, Justin Giovannetti writes in The Bulletin.
A wave of long Covid is likely to follow the omicron outbreak.
Health experts are warning the country to prepare for what could months or years of long Covid cases after the soaring number of infections in the omicron outbreak. On New Year’s Day fewer than 15,000 New Zealanders had tested positive for Covid over the course of the entire pandemic. The daily tally of new infections is now often higher than that and the country’s case total is nearing 400,000. About 10% of those cases are expected to continue experiencing Covid symptoms three months after contracting the virus. There are still numerous questions about long Covid, but it has been linked to a number of disparate symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, chest pain, muscle weakness as well as loss of taste and smell. As experts told RNZ, it needs to be taken very seriously.
There is one significant way to lower the risk of long Covid.
“Rest, rest, rest”. That’s the advice from Mona Jeffreys, a senior research fellow at Victoria University. She’s part of a study looking at the short and long-term impacts of the virus in Aotearoa, including long Covid. Speaking to The Bulletin, she said that the best way to avoid lasting symptoms is to take lots of rest during a Covid infection. Don’t push through, don’t try to burn it off. Rest. Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield and his chief science advisor, Ian Town, echoed her advice during a press conference yesterday. According to the Dominion Post, the government is now establishing a group to figure out how the health system will deal with long Covid.
There’s much about long Covid that’s still being discovered.
Long Covid can follow either mild symptoms or severe ones. It’s unclear if omicron will cause any fewer cases of long Covid than delta or variants before it. Long Covid seems to appear in many patients who have immune systems that were disrupted by a Covid infection and then never completely calmed down. That can set off a chain of vastly different symptoms across the body. The result can be debilitating, exhausting and last years. We really don’t know how long it might last. The New York Times has explored some of the causes of long Covid. As Bloomfield and Town said yesterday, it’s clearly not psychological. Long Covid is real. Doctors and patients need to try to recognise it and treat the symptoms as soon as they can.
The situation in New Zealand is likely to change in the coming months.
By definition, no one in New Zealand with omicron has developed long Covid yet—symptoms need to last at least 12 weeks. However that will start changing soon as the first omicron cases pass that threshold. It’s likely many cases are already suffering from symptoms that won’t go away. While long Covid clinics have been established in the US and across Europe, none are in Aotearoa yet. That will likely change. Jeffreys and the Victoria University study have already collected thousands of reports from people with long Covid from delta and earlier cases.
“Some of the stories we’ve had back are people living with it for 18, 20, 22 months. It’s really heartbreaking,” she said. But her concern is looking forward, at the massive omicron bump. “If we’re talking about 10% of those people still having symptoms at 12 weeks and half of them having symptoms a year later, that’s a huge burden on the healthcare system that we need to take seriously.”