SARS-CoV-2’s public health impact is worse than that of heart disease or cancer, study claims; others say the work may overestimate harm for the general population
Three-and-a-half years since SARS-CoV-2 spread around the world, scientists are still documenting the virus’ myriad effects on human health. What’s clear already is that those effects can continue long beyond the original infection.
Now, researchers have attempted to quantify this long-term harm using a massive database of U.S. veterans’ health records. They found a dramatically increased risk of dozens of conditions including heart failure and fatigue, sometimes years postinfection. Overall, the team estimates, COVID-19’s public health impact is more than 50% greater than that of cancer or heart disease.
Other researchers say the conclusions broadly reflect what physicians have seen. However, several cite drawbacks in the study’s statistical analysis that could have led it to overestimate harm to the general population. “The authors have done a good job in doing the analysis, but there are some limitations and those limitations are not small,” says Maarten van Smeden, a medical statistician at the University Medical Center Utrecht. “You have to take this with a little grain of salt.”
To assess COVID-19’s impact, Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, and colleagues analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In previous studies of this data set, the same researchers identified an elevated risk of heart attack and mental health disorders up to a year after infection.
This time, the team looked at 80 health problems—from fatigue and other symptoms commonly associated with Long Covid to neurodegenerative disease—and general risk of death or hospitalization up to 2 years postinfection. They included data from about 140,000 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 and 6 million people with no record of infection that year.