The United States needs to do more to track people with post-Covid syndrome, those with persistent and long-term symptoms, to better understand the disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday.
Fauci said the National Institutes of Health is following people who have recovered from Covid-19 to try and determine what percentage of them have a persistence of symptoms after they’ve cleared the virus.
For those who experience lingering symptoms, doctors know that it doesn’t seem to matter how severe their illness was, Fauci said during an event hosted by the American Medical Informatics Association.
People who have recovered from coronavirus have reported fatigue, shortness of breath and brain fog, among other symptoms, that last for weeks and even months after they’ve recovered.
It’s important to follow up to get a better understanding of the illness, Fauci said, but it won’t be easy.
“I think the only way we’re going to do that is through registries so that we’re able do that. It makes it easy with electronic records but not everybody has an electronic health record. That’s really the problem that we have in this country,” he said.
Fauci said it’s important to understand post-Covid syndrome to better understand the disease.
“We have people who have had mild disease, moderate disease or people who have been in intensive care units, who come out, who are very strong vigorous athletic people who just can’t function very well at all and we need to know how long that lasts and what is the physiological mechanism of it,” Fauci said.