According to new federal data, more than 3500 Americans have died from chronic diseases related to COVID-19.
Earlier on Wednesday, the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the report, which studied death certificate data from January 2020 to the end of June 2022.
The team of the National Health Service Center searched for several key terms, including "long-distance COVID-19", "chronic coronavirus" and "post coronavirus syndrome".
The results showed that long-term COVID-19 played a role in 3544 deaths, and this disease was listed as a potential or contributing cause of death.
Faridah Ahmed, a health scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, told ABC News: "This is the first time that we have used the death certificate data from the National Vital Statistics System to determine long crown deaths." "Because this is a new analysis, we saw long coronavirus in the death certificate for the first time. I think many aspects of this report are unique."
Although this is not a trivial number, it means that less than 1% of the more than 1 million deaths associated with COVID-19 during this period occurred over a long period of time.
When a patient who has cleared the infection still has symptoms at least four weeks after recovery, a long-term COVID-19 will appear. In some cases, these symptoms may last for months or even years.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, patients may experience various lingering symptoms, including fatigue, dyspnea, headache, brain fog, joint and muscle pain, and continuous loss of taste and smell.
It is not clear what causes people to suffer from long-term COVID-19, but research is ongoing.
The report found that February 2022 was the month with the highest number of long crown deaths, 393.
In addition, the proportion of deaths associated with long-term COVID-19 reached a peak of 1.2% in June 2021 and a peak of 3.8% in April 2022, both of which coincided with the decline of COVID-19 deaths.
Then, the research team studied the difference between men and women in COVID-19 death and long-term COVID-19 death between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022.
Although the proportion of male COVID-19 deaths is higher (56%), the proportion of male COVID-19 deaths is more average, 51.5%.
Similar to COVID-19, prolonged death is most common among older Americans.
The death toll from 75 to 84 years old accounted for 28.8% of the long crown deaths, followed by 28.1% of those over 85 years old and 21.5% of those aged 65 to 74 years old.
There are also differences in race. White Americans have the highest number of deaths due to long-term COVID-19 (78.5%), followed by black people (10.1%) and Hispanics (7.8%)
In contrast, Asian Americans, American Indians/Alaska Natives and other multi-ethnic Americans account for less than 2% of the deaths from COVID-19 infection every long time.
However, American Indians/Alaska Natives have the highest long-term COVID-19 mortality rate, 14.8 per 1 million people. At the same time, white Americans had the second highest prevalence, 6.7 per million people.
Although traditionally, black and Hispanic Americans have a high mortality rate of COVID-19, their long-term COVID-19 infection mortality rate is low, 6.4 per million people and 4.7 per million people, respectively.
According to the report, this may be because Hispanics and African Americans have a higher mortality rate of COVID-19, which means that there are fewer survivors of COVID-19 after a long time, and because they have less access to medical care, they also have fewer diagnoses.
Ahmed said that she hoped that the report would be the first step to more accurately track the death toll of COVID-19.
She said: "We have not used the official classification code of long-term new coronavirus on the death certificate, so this report is the first step. If we do this, it may be easier to track such deaths over time." "If guidance is needed on how to fill in the death certificate, when long-term COVID-19 is suspected to be the cause of death, this may help to obtain more accurate data on the death certificate."