The Long Term Implications of Covid

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The impact of a disease like covid can have far more long reaching impacts, and now is the time that those studies are starting to come out. And they can have really quite profound impacts on policy. For example, if you had some mysterious disease that killed three people, then you might think, well, its only killed three people, so it was not that important. But if you then found out that six thousand people were left blind, that's a huge impact. Looking at these meas in a different way can really change the way we think about policy.

The global burden of COVID-19 has predominantly been measured using metrics like case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths. But the long term health impacts are more difficult to capture. In this episode of Coronapod we discuss one way that public health experts are trying to get to grips with the problem using metrics such as disability adjusted life years (DALYs) and quality adjusted life years (QALYs).

As new data suggests that COVID could leave millions with lasting disability or ill-health, we ask how changing the lens through which we asses the impacts of COVID could change public health policies, the perception of risk and even the behaviour of individuals.

News Feature: The four most urgent questions about long COVID

Comment: Count the cost of disability caused by COVID-19

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