pandemic recedes, we’re going to be left with the legacy of this pandemic — a legacy of chronic disease" for which health-care systems are unprepared, says study co-author Ziyad Al-Aly, chief researcher for the Veterans Affairs (VA) St Louis Healthcare System in Missouri. Covid-19 amplifies the risks of developing diabetes Al-Aly and Yan Xie, an epidemiologist also at the VA St Louis Healthcare System, looked at the medical records of more than 180,000 people who had survived for longer than a month after catching Covid-19.
They compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four million people without SARS-CoV-2 infection who had used the VA health-care system, either before or during the pandemic.
The duo had earlier used a similar method to show that Covid19 increases the risk of kidney disease, heart failure and stroke.
The latest analysis found that people who had had Covid-19 were about 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later.