Why India should worry about post-COVID-19 care

When 60-year-old Milind Ketkar returned home after spending nearly a month in hospital battling COVID-19, he thought the worst was over.

People had to carry him to his third-floor flat as his building didn't have a lift. He spent the next few days feeling constantly breathless and weak. When he didn't start to feel better, he contacted Dr Lancelot Pinto at Mumbai's PD Hinduja hospital, where he had been treated.

Dr Pinto told him inflammation in the lungs, caused by Covid-19, had given him deep vein thrombosis - it occurs when blood clots form in the body and it often happens in the legs.

Fragments can break off and move up the body into the lungs, blocking blood vessels and, said Dr Pinto, this can be life-threatening if not diagnosed and treated in time.

Mr Ketkar spent the next month confined to his flat, taking tablets for his condition. "I was not able to move much. My legs constantly hurt and I struggled to do even daily chores. It was a nightmare," he says.

He is still on medication, but he says he is on the road to recovery.

Mr Ketkar is not alone in this - tens of thousands of people have been reporting post-Covid health complications from across the world. Thrombosis is common - it has been found in 30% of seriously ill coronavirus patients, according to experts. These problems have been generally described as "long Covid" or "long-haul Covid".

Awareness around post-Covid care is crucial, but its not the focus in India because the country is still struggling to control the spread of the virus. It has the world's second-highest caseload and has been averaging 90,000 cases daily in recent weeks.

Dr Natalie Lambert, research professor of medicine at Indiana University in the US, was one of the early voices to warn against post-Covid complications.

She surveyed thousands of people on social media and noticed that an alarmingly high number of them were complaining about post-Covid complications such as extreme fatigue, breathlessness and even hair loss.

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US reported its own survey results a few weeks later and acknowledged that at least 35% of those surveyed had not returned to their usual state of health.

Post-Covid complications are more common among those who were seriously ill, but Dr Lambert says an increasing number of moderately ill patients - even those who didn't need to be admitted to hospital - haven't recovered fully.

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Source: BBC News, 28 September 2020