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Medicine

Almost a Third of Recovered COVID-19 Patients Return To Hospital In Five Months, One In Eight Die (yahoo.com) 294

According to new research from Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (NS), almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients will end up back in the hospital within five months and one in eight will die. Yahoo News reports via The Telegraph: Out of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died. The current cut-off point for recording Covid deaths is 28 days after a positive test, so it may mean thousands more people should be included in the coronavirus death statistics. Researchers have called for urgent monitoring of people who have been discharged from hospital.

Study author Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University, said: "This is the largest study of people discharged from hospital after being admitted with Covid. 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. 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."

The study found that Covid survivors were nearly three and a half times more likely to be readmitted to hospital, and die, in the 140 days timeframe than other hospital outpatients. Prof Khunti said the team had been surprised to find that many people were going back in with a new diagnosis, and many had developed heart, kidney and liver problems, as well as diabetes. "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,â he added. "We've seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they've cardiac problems and liver problems. These people urgently require follow up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins."

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Almost a Third of Recovered COVID-19 Patients Return To Hospital In Five Months, One In Eight Die

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  • for the stats people.
    NS in the UK generally stands for 'National Savings'.

  • TFA is here (Score:5, Informative)

    by valentyn ( 248783 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:19AM (#60963004) Homepage

    https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249885 , principal author is Daniel Ayoubkhani (ORCID: 0000-0001-6352-0394). (Why is Slashdot citing Yahoo citing The Telegraph?)

  • by UPi ( 137083 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:50AM (#60963080) Homepage

    So first of all, as someone who has relatives contract Covid just a month ago, this is horrifying. Long covid is terrifying me to no end.

    On a completely unrelated topic: why would anyone, ever link to Yahoo! News? The same article on Telegraph has additional charts and diagrams, wisely stripped by the Yahoo! editing (because who needs graphics when you can have text?). In exchange for stripping the article Yahoo! tries to set enough tracking and profiling cookies to make up for it in bandwidth. Good deal, huh?

  • Headline doesn't seem right to me.
    • Maybe because you cannot read?

      and 12.3 per cent of the total died

      The only total mentioned is the 47k. If they were talking about the 12.3% of the 30% then they would say something like "and 12.3% of those died". The two stats are not related. There is no reason to assume even that the 12.3% were re-admitted before they died which is the real take away. To use some math terms, the 12.3% is not a subset but they also are not mutual exclusive -- so we would need some more info to draw our Venn diagram. Some of these people may never even get me

  • Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @04:14AM (#60963140)

    Just maybe - the idea of going for 'herd immunity' without a vaccine by some folks here was a profoundly bad idea, based on what they felt on a whim... and evidence is constantly showing them wrong.

    Over, and over, and over again.

    Now we have a working vaccine that is proving safe and reliable at a population level - people don't have to catch it AT ALL.

    Keep in mind - we've lost well over 400,000 people so far - at 7% infection. Maybe we should try and understand why it's still a priority to not let that number go up.

    And then once we work together until we reach 300 million or so vaccinated folks - we get an ACTUAL herd immunity levels WITHOUT constantly killing such large numbers of people,

    It's at that point that that maybe we keep that little bit of wisdom in our cap - that there are better ways to act in a pandemic. It's one of those times when science and people that have trained their entire lifetimes saving people's lives internationally are worth listening to - that lives are actually worth saving, because it really does stand a good chance of saving your loved ones in the end - yes, even saving strangers can help you.

    And if you're trying to maximize freedom - there are times when working together to save lives gets to to maximum freedom much more efficiently than raging against shared efforts.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by IdanceNmyCar ( 7335658 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @06:33AM (#60963348)

      I think the "herd immunity" concept is laughable with a relatively unknown pathogen. It makes me wonder if anyone has suggested herd immunity with Ebola...

      People are relatively stupid about these things. The development of vaccines probably isn't even discussed in high schools today, much less during high school of the parents of those children. "Life sciences" need to be more heavily taught in a theoretical sense instead of how biology is taught more from a memorization standpoint. Between knowing the parts of a cell and the general implications of the theory of evolution, the latter seems a whole lot more important with respect to our daily lives. Right now the virus is mutating... it's mutating more quickly because people tried herd immunity... interesting.

      More so the culture of ignorance is equivalent to skepticism is likewise laughable. People think they can sling some of their armchair skepticism against every scientific paper and it should hold the same weight as the peer review system of publishing scientific papers. Not all journals are equal in quality certainly but you cannot just through shit at all of them which is what 50% of the people want to do, half the time by quoting a poorly reviewed journal against a quality one. I think the fossil fuel companies have literally funded this whole form of debate for like half century now... so we can at least understand how it got ingrained.

      However, I personally don't know if I think the vaccine is safe... there are reports of deaths, primarily from the Chinese vaccine and being in China, I have heard people state their fears with taking the vaccine. We know the vaccine creates a "mild" form of the symptoms but most are saying it's comparable to a severe case of the flu. Flu kills a lot of people. When we consider comorbidity and age, the vaccine is likely not good for some individuals, especially without medical attention. How many of these people should be in hospitals during the period they recover from the vaccine -- this is a question I haven't seen asked anywhere and seems "fair". So the vaccine is certainly better than getting the virus but the use of it for some groups, may still be quite dangerous and I don't see this often discussed. Again let me state the difference, I am not saying don't get a vaccine and to return to the concept of herd immunity we really need most of the population taking the vaccine but we know some people cannot and shouldn't take vaccines but we don't seem to know just how much of the population that is for this vaccine. This number essentially says "how safe the vaccine is".

      As for the freedom matter. I think it's funny Americans put this pin on their cap like they are the best at freedom. There are countries that in many measures of freedom do better than America -- we aren't number one. More so, "in the pursuit of happiness" the language specifically states liberty and security... so once cannot have one without the other. People often give the rhetoric that sacrificing our liberty for security means we deserve neither but the reality is liberty doesn't exist outside security.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I think the "herd immunity" concept is laughable with a relatively unknown pathogen. It makes me wonder if anyone has suggested herd immunity with Ebola...

        To be fair, Ebola has "herd immunity" in a sense. It kills those off that are careless or not careful enough fast. This is just a "meta immunity", but pretty effective. COVID unfortunately kills very slowly and people are infectious before they are really in trouble and hence that meta-mechanic is not there or only there for people that can deal and prepare for a pretty abstract threat (a small minority).

        More so the culture of ignorance is equivalent to skepticism is likewise laughable. People think they can sling some of their armchair skepticism against every scientific paper and it should hold the same weight as the peer review system of publishing scientific papers.

        Very much this. Sure, there are pretty bad publication venues and part of being an expert in a field is

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This study was about Brits - and "herd immunity" was a plan put forth by the idiot British Government (before anyone knew anything more than the name of the virus and that it was killing Italians). Once a few senior people in government actually got Covid though, the idea was quickly dropped and we (eventually) had Lockdown v1.0.

      The suspected architect of the "herd immunity" plan has since left government - and joyously, got to leave his office carrying a cardboard storage box with his stuff in it. He left,

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Just maybe - the idea of going for 'herd immunity' without a vaccine by some folks here was a profoundly bad idea, based on what they felt on a whim... and evidence is constantly showing them wrong.

      Even at the start, it was pretty clear they were wrong (with a small probability of error, which by now is essentially gone). The problem with these defectives is that they desperately wish to make this threat seem as harmless as possible and that includes herd immunity being a good idea. Of course, this is an utter risk-management fail, because while you can accept a risk, you need to really understand it before you do with at least some solid upper boundaries on damage if the risk realizes. Hence these people live in a fantasy-world and never really tried to understand available data and facts. The reason is obviously that they never learned to control their fear and to keep their mind working in the presence of fear. Basically personalities on low development level.

  • Original Study (Score:5, Informative)

    by martynhare ( 7125343 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @07:39AM (#60963466)
    https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... [medrxiv.org]

    There needs to be a new law mandating that newspapers publish scientific sources when publishing scientific claims. Especially when they are new and not peer reviewed yet.

    Conclusions: Individuals discharged from hospital following COVID-19 face elevated rates of multi-organ dysfunction compared with background levels, and the increase in risk is neither confined to the elderly nor uniform across ethnicities. The diagnosis, treatment and prevention of PCS require integrated rather than organ- or disease-specific approaches. Urgent research is required to establish risk factors for PCS.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @11:22AM (#60964228)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde

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