A disease unlike any other. This is how patients who are cured of coronavirus feel. But despite the healing, the Covid-19 will leave traces, after all not identical from one person to another.
In fact, “we don’t think there will be any sequelae for people who have had weak symptoms,” Xavier Lescure, professor and infectiologist at Bichat hospital in Paris, told FranceInfo.
However, the little perspective that doctors have on this pathology does not allow them to accurately issue the aftereffects that will continue to seriously affect patients. However, some of them seem to be attested today.
Pulmonary fibrosis
The lungs are the first organs affected by the coronavirus. In a 3D video made by researchers at the George Washington University Hospital in the United States, we can see that on lungs severely infected with Covid-19 the lung tissue is very largely damaged. As Dr. Keith Mortman, head of the thoracic surgery department, confirms: “When this inflammation is reduced, it leaves scars on the lungs and creates long-term damage.” Adding that: “this may deteriorate a patient’s breathing capacity in the future”.
Thus, severely affected patients would develop pulmonary fibrosis, causing some of them to experience severe respiratory discomfort. A pathology that autopsies have confirmed. As Xavier Lescure points out: “we see that people who die have large lesions linked to pulmonary inflammation”
Post-traumatic stress
There are the physical sequelae and there are the neurocognitive sequelae. The latter are the result of a long period of intensive care that some seriously ill patients undergo. Questioned by FranceInfo, Professor Jean-Michel Constantin, anesthesiologist-resuscitator at Pitié-Salpétrière (Paris): “we observe very impressive neurocognitive sequelae following acute respiratory distress syndromes”.
A long and sometimes traumatic passage for some patients. Indeed, “you find yourself for three weeks with a machine that breathes for you, you fall asleep, you are paralyzed with curares (anesthetics, note),” explained the head of the intensive care intensive care unit at the hospital. Saint-Antoine in Paris.
And faced with the post-traumatic syndrome that some people can develop, Professor Jean-Michel Constantin, warns: “All this is regressive but it takes time, years. And you don’t recover the same way at 20 or 80. ” Some experts, in the same line, warned that resuscitation can be “unreasonable”, thus advising some patients palliative care, rather than resuscitation.
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