Long-term effects of COVID-19 ‘really troublesome’ for young people, Fauci says
Fauci spoke as the keynote speaker for the American Society for Microbiology’s virtual event, ASM Microbe Online.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the top infectious disease doctors in the United States. In his recent keynote address, he informed listeners that the coronavirus has longterm side effects most people are unaware of.
On Monday, Fauci spoke at the American Society for Microbiology’s virtual event, ASM Microbe Online, which the organization held in place of their in-person event.
The annual event offers attendees an opportunity to explore the science of microbiology through the lens of various specialties across different learning formats.
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Fauci emphasized that young adults and kids who have had a “mild” case of the coronavirus take a significant amount of time to recover from all symptoms.
“We’d better be careful when we say ‘young people who don’t wind up in the hospital are fine, let them get infected, it’s OK.’ No, it’s not OK,” said Fauci.
According to him, seniors and babies are not the only groups at risk of being impacted by the virus long term.
“In individuals who are young and otherwise healthy, who don’t require hospitalization, but do get sick and symptomatic enough to be in bed for a week or two or three and then get better, they clear the virus — they have residual symptoms for weeks and sometimes months,” he continued.
Fauci reported that these individuals “have a substantially high proportion of cardiovascular abnormalities, evidence of myocarditis by MRI and PET scans, evidence of emerging cardiomyopathies.”
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“These are people that supposedly recovered from Covid-19,” Fauci said. He noted that the perceived recovery is not always as full of a recovery as some people have begun to infer. He labeled the residual impact on young people who contract this virus as being “really troublesome”.
Doctors, researchers, and everyday people are continuing to discover the long-term effects COVID-19 has on the body.
“I’ll guarantee you if we have this conversation again, six months to a year from now, we’ll be reviewing the literature about talking about the long-term deleterious effects of non-hospitalized patients,” said Dr. Fauci.
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