PANAJI: For some of the over 1.4 lakh people in Goa who’ve been cured of Covid-19, recovery isn’t the end of the disease.
Across the state, patients have seen the virus come back to haunt them, leading to a heart attack, stroke, or even a pulmonary embolism, a dangerous condition that blocks the artery in the lungs.
While Goa Medical College (GMC) has started collecting data of patients with post-Covid-19 complications, doctors said that they have been seeing patients with a history of Covid-19 suffering a wide range of serious complications.
“As per guidelines, Covid-19 patients are put on blood thinners, yet in some cases, after recovery or at the time of discharge, we have seen an increase in blood clotting that can lead to complicating conditions.
Some suffer while undergoing treatment for Covid-19, and some after their recovery,” said Dr Vinayaga Pandian, a consulting cardiologist at Victor Hospital.
Pandian said that one of his senior citizen patients suffered a stroke while still recovering from Covid-19, causing paralysis.
GMC consulting cardiologist Dr Manjunath Desai said that a pulmonary embolism (which can also occur post-Covid) is a rare condition and sometimes can be worse than a heart attack.
It is difficult to treat and at times can lead to permanent disability and heart failure, he said.
“We treated a 40-year-old patient who had a pulmonary embolism.
He was picked up on time for treatment, as he came from a family of doctors,” Pandian said.
Overall, Desai said that in Goa, they have seen relatively young as well as aged patients having post-Covid heart attacks, and they have been treated successfully.
“Though there is a temporal relation between a patient suffering a heart attack or stroke and his Covid history, I cannot say with certainty that the patients in question would not have suffered a heart failure had they not contracted the virus, until proven by a study,” Desai said.
Dr Chitralekha Nayak, a consulting physician at Healthway Hospital, said while during the first wave of the pandemic, she saw several cases of heart attacks or stroke after patients had Covid-19, during the ongoing wave, she has seen some peculiar cases of patients having a low-grade fever even after twenty-days of Covid-19.
Though their condition was not life-threatening, they still needed to be investigated and put on a short course of steroids, Nayak said.
She however stressed that more research needs to be done on this mutation of the virus.
“The virus has become very severe, patients are either surviving or dying, even some of those who came on time for treatment,” she said.
“Some do not respond to treatment.
Those patients probably required oxygen to be given early.
Initially, we saw patients’ oxygen levels dropping on the ninth day of the infection, but this time, some had their oxygen dropping on the seventh day itself.” People having underlying health conditions and falling in the high-risk category — those with diabetes, high cholesterol or other comorbidities — or even people with healthy lifestyles but who are unaware of their condition as no tests were done till the problem surfaced, also face risks of developing blood clots.
Pandian said that during the pre-Covid era, people could choose to ignore any symptoms of a heart ailment or any discomfort for a day or two, but not anymore.
“Now if you are unwell and you decide to put off seeing a doctor even for a day, chances are that you might not live to see the next day, or land with complications,” he said.
People should not underestimate symptoms like breathlessness, chest pain, vague headache, vision disturbance, or any vague indicators — sweating profusely, drop in energy levels, abdominal pain, doctors say, adding that it is better to investigate these conditions thoroughly.