Living with covid-19

Trish Greenhalgh and colleagues recommend taking a whole person, pragmatic approach with symptom management that avoids overinvestigation.5 With so much uncertainty about the cause and course of long covid, a doctor’s key role is to be a witness, they say, “‘honouring the story’ of the patient whose...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMJ 2020-09, Vol.370, p.m3392
Main Author: Godlee, Fiona
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Disease transmission
Editor's Choice
Fines & penalties
Long COVID
Public health
Symptom management
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Trish Greenhalgh and colleagues recommend taking a whole person, pragmatic approach with symptom management that avoids overinvestigation.5 With so much uncertainty about the cause and course of long covid, a doctor’s key role is to be a witness, they say, “‘honouring the story’ of the patient whose protracted recovery is unexpected, alarming, and does not make sense.” The challenge for those in charge of our public health response to covid-19 is to make sense of this emergent information. Policies and messaging must now reflect the risks to younger people of developing prolonged illness and multiple organ damage, especially in light of other new information about the risks of airborne transmission.67 For this, we need to be able to quantify the risks through proper population surveillance and to mitigate them with effective systems of rapid testing, tracing, isolation, and support.8 In the UK, at least, such crucial traditional public health approaches still seem a long way off.9 1 Alwan NA.
ISSN:1756-1833
1756-1833
DOI:10.1136/bmj.m3392