HUNTER health professionals are coming to grips with the likely impacts of long COVID-19 as more and more people continue to live with symptoms post-acute infection.
Conjoint Professor Peter Wark, a senior staff specialist in respiratory and sleep medicine at John Hunter hospital and medical director for the NSW Health Agency of Clinical Innovation said the properly named 'post acute sequelae of COVID-19' was "very, very real" and was affecting a large proportion of people.
Between 40 and 60 per cent of people hospitalised with COVID-19, who still had symptoms at the three-month mark, were likely to continue to experience symptoms for up to six to 12 months, he said.
"Across the board there's the realisation that we've got a large proportion of patients out there that are likely to need some assessment and we're seeing some of that come through now," he said.
"In the long COVID space, it really reflects what happened three to six months ago, as opposed to the more recent Omicron wave we've had since January.
"So most of the experience we have got at the moment with long COVID has really come from the Delta outbreak which happened from July onwards in NSW, including Newcastle, and it's really too early for us to know with the more recent cases."
The severity of a person's acute illness was the most important predictor as to whether or not they would have ongoing problems with COVID, including long COVID, he said.
"That is not an all or nothing thing, certainly people can have milder disease and still have a number and a range of symptoms," he said.
Vaccination and previous exposure to COVID reduces the chance of having significant long COVID symptoms.
"We are hoping that will have a significant effect on reducing the burden we are going to face going forward," Dr Wark said.
Long COVID symptoms can include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction and others that can generally have an impact on everyday functioning.
"Around a third of people hospitalised with acute COVID-19 have got changes we can measure and see with impaired lung function or abnormalities on chest X-ray or CT scan,"he said. "Those individuals complain of breathlessness.
"There are problems with fatigue, post-exertion fatigue, muscle aches and pains, there are neurological complications, particularly what people describe as brain fog, difficulties thinking and other symptoms such as loss of smell or taste which can last a very long time and sometimes does not return completely.
"These are real symptoms being experienced by a very large number of people out there, and ... I think it's too easy to dismiss it, and we've got a growing body of evidence of abnormalities ... with research-based tools."
A very large US Veteran study showed a 1.5 increased risk of both heart attack or stroke, he said.
"You can have COVID-19 and you can recover, but there is a real risk in the post-recovery phase of having a very serious illness where these complications are going to become very important, so heart disease and stroke, and it will only become obvious as time goes by. It's always going to best not to get it in the first place."
NSW Health is putting together clinical guidelines to outline the problems and ways to address them, and models of care to manage it, he said.
Most international experience has come from the UK and most of their clinical experiences have come before widespread community vaccination became available, so it was still unclear what the burden of long COVID-19 might look like in Australia, he said.
Two elderly people from the Hunter region are among the latest to die with COVID-19.
The Hunter New England region recorded 2388 new cases of the virus in the 24 hours to 4pm on Saturday, down from 2677 the previous day.
Hunter New England Health said a woman aged in her 90s from Lake Macquarie and man in his 80s from the Upper Hunter were among the 11 people who died with the virus during the latest reporting period.
There are 79 people with COVID-19 in Hunter New England hospitals -six of those are in intensive care.
NSW recorded 16,807 new cases during the period.
There are 1355 COVID-19 patients in hospitals across the state, including 50 in ICU.
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