Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press Posted on Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at 6:45 am EDT
A new study finds that prolonged COVID has significantly increased doctor visits, home care needs and hospitalizations for a small proportion of Ontarians infected early in the pandemic.
Researchers say that doesn’t bode well for a health care system that was further hit by an Omicron surge earlier this year and is now bracing for an expected fall and winter surge.
“Many of us are concerned about how we’re going to provide care for those … with cancer and heart attacks and strokes, and also trying to make up for the backlog of care that hasn’t been managed over the last two years.” , says Dr. Candace McNaughton, co-author and emergency physician.
The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looked at the health care use of 531,702 Ontario residents who had PCR tests between January 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021.
The researchers focused on a relatively small group of Ontarians who sought COVID-19 care eight weeks or more after diagnosis. Their results suggest that this cohort spent an average of 50% more days in hospital than their counterparts who were not infected.
At the higher end, the analysis suggests that one percent of women spent six and a half more days in hospital and received 28 more home care visits per year than they would otherwise. One percent of men had about nine more days in hospital, but fewer home care needs.
While one percent is a small proportion, the outsized demand from this subset for increased medical care has strained resources that have only gotten scarcer this year, McNaughton says.
He pointed to a significant jump in COVID-19 infections since the study was conducted, as well as a critical staff shortage that has prolonged emergency department stays and overwhelmed children’s hospitals.
The report concludes with a call for substantial restructuring and investment in health care.
“When we started our analysis, it was just under a year ago that things looked like they were coming to an end. And we really hoped at the time that this would be a purely academic exercise,” says McNaughton.
“Canada had done a fantastic job of containing the viral spread, and so there weren’t really, compared to many other countries, that many infected individuals. But about a year later, more than half of Canadians have become infected and so one percent of half the country is very important.”
According to the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force, the more infectious Omicron variants surged in cases throughout much of 2022 to infect 62 per cent of Canadians in September, down from 5 per cent in August 2021 before the Delta wave.
McNaughton says it’s unclear how much of the current crisis facing many hospitals is affected by long-running COVID cases, but he’s seen patients “spending 12, 16, 18 hours in the ED with complications from an infection prior to COVID”. Because PCR tests are no longer available, he said it is now difficult to confirm COVID infections.
Much of the long COVID also continues to confound doctors, he adds.
“Often, patients have to go to multiple doctors to try to figure out what’s going on. And once they’re diagnosed with long-term COVID-19, we don’t have any treatment for it that we know is effective. So they find themselves trying -ho. a lot of different things,” he says.
“For someone who is no longer well, who feels quite unwell, it can be a tremendous burden on them and their families to try to navigate the health care system.”
He says the study’s findings also make a good case for a return to indoor mask mandates, especially as flu season also approaches.
Previous infection doesn’t guarantee you won’t get COVID-19 again, he says, and even mild cases can lead to so-called prolonged COVID, which is often defined by symptoms lasting more than three months.
McNaughton says she would like the government to invest more in the recruitment and retention of nurses, as well as improve indoor ventilation and resume COVID-19 surveillance measures to better communicate the risks of infection to the public.
“I’m hopeful that people, governments and health care leaders can look at this information and plan ahead how they’re going to use available resources,” says McNaughton, PhD, of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto.
“Where do we put our effort and time, manpower and money looking forward within the competitive landscape?”