Almost one-third of patients who recovered from COVID-19 were readmitted to the hospital within five months and one in eight died, according to a report by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics in the U.K. Statistics showed that out of 47,780 people who were discharged from the hospital during the first wave of COVID-19, 29.4% returned to the hospital and 12.3% died from COVID-19 related problems.
According to the Daily Mail, many survivors of COVID-19 go on to develop serious health issues such as heart problems, diabetes, and chronic kidney and liver disease. Study author Kamlesh Khunti, a professor of primary care diabetes and vascular Medicine at the University of Leicester, said this was the largest study of its kind to date tracking recovered COVID-19 patients.
“People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in, and dying. We see 30% have been readmitted, and that’s a lot of people. The numbers are so large,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.
The study found that survivors of the disease were nearly three-and-a-half times more likely to be readmitted and die within 140 days than other outpatients, according to the New York Post. Khunti said that the patients were readmitted with a new diagnosis, such as diabetes or liver disease, and stated it is important that COVID-19 survivors are placed on protective therapies such as statin drugs and aspirin.
“We don’t know if it’s because COVID-19 destroyed the beta cells that make insulin, and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,” he said, according to the Post.
Lynn C. Allison ✉
Lynn C. Allison, a Newsmax health reporter, is an award-winning medical journalist and author of more than 30 self-help books.
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