Pattern of post Covid deaths amongst the elderly

[Gfamily]

An interesting comment from my GP sister - that her practice noticed a distinctive pattern of deaths amongst their Care Home patients.
These were generally elderly patients (naturally), but not necessarily the oldest or weakest - who had contracted Covid, and from which they had made seemingly made a reasonable recovery.

However, there did seem to be a pattern of them generally 'fading' after their recovery from the acute phase, and although definitely not showing any Covid symptoms, they often died within a couple of months of recovering.

These weren't patients who had needed admission to ICU, and had lost the principal Covid symptoms, so there was no reason to include Covid on the Death Certificate, and being well beyond the 28 day following their PCR test, they wouldn't have been included in the NHS or the ONS statistics for 'Covid' deaths, but nor could they be counted as 'missed diagnoses because of Covid' deaths - they were under the active care of their GP practice, but was no specific diagnosis that their conditions would have warranted.

It is suspected that maybe absence of visitors during shut-down, or that many of the people they are seeing are having to wear full PPE was generally suppressing their engagement with the world, but that's not clear.

[bagpuss]

I remember reading that there's a similar impact of pneumonia in elderly patients (and anecdotally seeing the same in my grandfather-in-law*). I googled and found this paper (among others) that compared people who fully recovered from pneumonia with a matched sample of general population and found higher death rates among those who had had pneumonia.

So it may not have anything to do with visits or PPE but something similar to whatever is causing the effect in post-pneumonia patients.






*Although in his case he lived another 4.5 years, but the step change in his overall health was dramatic to see.

[Millennie Al]

compared people who fully recovered from pneumonia with a matched sample of general population and found higher death rates among those who had had pneumonia.

It's possible that the cause and effect are the other way around - some deterioration in health which isn't directly observed immediately makes people more susceptible to infection.

[Gfamily]

I googled and found this paper (among others) that compared people who fully recovered from pneumonia with a matched sample of general population and found higher death rates among those who had had pneumonia.

That's interesting, and I'll pass this over to my sister, but her observation of post-Covid-recovery decline is across weeks rather than years.

[bagpuss]

I googled and found this paper (among others) that compared people who fully recovered from pneumonia with a matched sample of general population and found higher death rates among those who had had pneumonia.

That's interesting, and I'll pass this over to my sister, but her observation of post-Covid-recovery decline is across weeks rather than years.

While my grandfather-in-law lived 4.5 years after pneumonia, his decline was dramatic within the first few weeks. If he hadn't been so ridiculously healthy for his age beforehand, that decline could very well have brought him low enough that he might have died quite quickly. Shortly before he had pneumonia, we were doing cryptic crosswords together (he did most of the work - just asked me for help on the ones he was stuck on). After he was supposedly recovered from pneumonia, he couldn't manage more than a short simple conversation before he was both physically and mentally exhausted and he never improved from there.

Perhaps Covid is having a similar but more extreme effect?

compared people who fully recovered from pneumonia with a matched sample of general population and found higher death rates among those who had had pneumonia.

It's possible that the cause and effect are the other way around - some deterioration in health which isn't directly observed immediately makes people more susceptible to infection.

True, it's always possible. The pneumonia, or Covid, is a more obvious reason but we shouldn't ignore the possibility that there's something else going on.