COVID-19 survivors—including those not sick enough to be hospitalized—have an increased risk of death in the six months following diagnosis with the virus, researchers report.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, it has become clear that many survivors—even those who had mild cases—continue to manage a variety of health problems long after the initial infection should have resolved.

The researchers have catalogued the numerous diseases associated with COVID-19, providing a big-picture overview of the long-term complications of COVID-19 and revealing the massive burden this disease is likely to place on the world’s population in the coming years.

The study included more than 87,000 COVID-19 patients and nearly 5 million control patients in a federal database.

“Our study demonstrates that up to six months after diagnosis, the risk of death following even a mild case of COVID-19 is not trivial and increases with disease severity,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that long COVID-19—the long-term health consequences of COVID-19—is America’s next big health crisis. Given that more than 30 million Americans have been infected with this virus, and given that the burden of long COVID-19 is substantial, the lingering effects of this disease will reverberate for many years and even decades. Physicians must be vigilant in evaluating people who have had COVID-19. These patients will need integrated, multidisciplinary care.”

Read the full article about COVID-19 survivors by Julia Evangelou Strait at Futurity.