Long covid can be deadly, CDC study finds

12/15/22
 
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from The Washington Post,
12/14/22:

A study released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics found that more than 3,500 Americans died of long-covid-related illness in the first 2½ years of the pandemic.

While those deaths represent a small fraction of the 1 million deaths from the coronavirus, they reinforce the danger of ignoring the lingering symptoms that many patients say their physicians have dismissed.

“A lot of people think of long covid as associated with long-term illness,” said Farida Ahmad, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and lead author of the study. “This shows it can be a cause of death.”

While CDC data show that women are more likely than men to develop long covid, the study found that men accounted for a slightly higher percentage of long-covid deaths. Most of the documented long-covid deaths occurred in older people, with adults between 75 and 84 years old accounting for almost 30 percent of the deaths, closely followed by adults 85 and older.

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