Researchers, clinicians, and patients have gathered in Victoria for what was probably the first conference in Australia devoted entirely to the issue of long COVID.
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00:00 So this is probably the largest survey to date. There are other research projects going
00:06 on, one in Sydney called ADAPT, but this was a survey of 12,670 people, thereabouts. Going
00:13 back to January 2020, who'd been infected with COVID. They also had a group of people
00:17 who hadn't been infected with COVID for comparison. And they were able to track them and survey
00:24 them to see how many had persistent symptoms beyond three months, any symptoms at all.
00:29 And what they showed was that the risk was about a 14% proportion of people who had persistent
00:39 symptoms over these three years. But when you alluded that, in fact, it was changing.
00:45 So if you'd got COVID back in January 2020, your chances of getting persistent symptoms
00:51 were about 25%, one in four. And that drops down to about nearly just a little bit over
00:56 one in 10 now. It still means though that there could be, just in Victoria alone, this
01:03 was a Victorian survey, there could be 400,000 people with persistent COVID symptoms. And
01:09 there are lots of unusual things that were surprising things in this survey. First of
01:13 all, we tend to think that long COVID occurs in people who have severe disease. Now, there's
01:19 no question that severe disease increases your risk of persistent symptoms, often with
01:25 organ damage. But only 8% of people had severe COVID in this sample. 92% had mild to moderate
01:34 symptoms and 40% were aged between 40 and 59. So this was not necessarily an elderly
01:41 population who were vulnerable. This was you and me.
01:45 So does this mean that long COVID is a bigger problem than we thought it was?
01:50 Well, it tends to go along with other surveys, but some people have said it's 3%, some people
01:54 have said it's 15%. So 10%, 12% is what other surveys tend to be showing. But it's
02:01 significant. I mean, it's a very large number of people. And about one in four of those
02:05 people with long COVID were saying that it has affected their lives. They're not living
02:09 life the way they want to, and some were quite severely disabled.
02:12 So what were some of the key concerns that came out of this conference?
02:16 Well, one of the, the lack of an easy explanation for what's going on. So the people had brain
02:23 fog, they had fatigue, they had weakness, breathlessness, exertion, insomnia, headaches,
02:30 migraine being made worse, asthma being made worse. The concern is getting help to these
02:35 people. Many of them will get better of their own accord. We heard about research and there's
02:41 research going on in Sydney and the Kirby Institute which suggests there may be interesting
02:45 medications that could be used for some of these people, but it's not just one disease.
02:50 The question is equipping general practitioners to be able to deal with it. Because these
02:53 people were not going to see endocrinologists and cardiologists. They were going to see
02:58 GP specialists. And GPs are, you know, they don't have the infrastructure around them
03:05 to be able to deal with this. You need exercise specialists, you need psychologists. A lot
03:09 of people had depression and anxiety, either because they were fed up with the symptoms
03:14 and worried about them, or maybe the brain effects themselves were causing psychological
03:18 issues. People get nutritional problems, their microbiome changes. You need a lot of professionals
03:24 coming together and general practice isn't equipped for that, even if the spirit's willing.
03:30 Did you get a sense from the health professionals in the room during the conference that they
03:34 are very worried about this situation with long Covid?
03:37 Well, they're worried enough that they got together about it and they're worried about
03:42 the dimensions of the problem. And there's a lot of people out there who are experiencing
03:47 this in silence. So not everybody, far from everybody in this survey, had gone to see
03:52 anybody about it. They were living with these symptoms quietly by themselves, thinking,
03:56 well, maybe this is normal. Nobody's got any help for me. What have you. So there's just
04:01 this worry that this is a dampener on a large proportion of the population. And of course,
04:08 politicians don't want to talk about it. We all want Covid to be over. But there's this
04:12 legacy of Covid and there's more Covid around the corner, unfortunately.
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