Covid infections are putting people at higher risk of diabetes, strokes, heart disease and other long-term illnesses – but experts warn it may be decades before the full impact is known.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, could Covid-19 also be blamed for the increased frequency and severity of colds and flu? Has it damaged our ability to fight off infections?<\/p>\n
Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda said some viruses, which used to cause barely a sniffle in healthy adults, were now putting people in hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re now seeing your typical regular healthy middle-aged person presenting to ED with bad cases of RSV. And that’s pretty novel for us,\u201d Payinda said.<\/p>\n
He suspected Covid may have damaged people\u2019s immunity in subtle ways that fell below the threshold to qualify as long Covid.<\/p>\n
Several international studies – involving millions of people, mainly from before vaccines became widely available – found a Covid infection doubled the risk of developing heart disease and increased the chance of stroke 1.6 fold.<\/p>\n
It was also associated with higher rates of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of long-term sequelae to Covid that we don\u2019t really know yet and we may not know for years,\u201d Payinda said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPost polio syndromes were not identified for literally decades after polio infections. The same with the 1918 flu epidemic – people born during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic had a two- to three-fold increased risk of later developing Parkinson\u2019s Disease.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Covid infections are putting people at higher risk of diabetes, strokes, heart disease and other long-term illnesses – but experts warn it may be decades before the full impact is known.<\/p>\n