“Clearly, in order to interpret the dependence of life on coronavirus infection, you need to have a fairly serious statistical basis for such statements. And today it is somewhat premature,” Associate professor of the Department of Infectious Diseases of the RUDN Sergey Voznesensky told RBC.
“Too little time has passed [since the beginning of the pandemic] for us to assess life expectancy and how it has been affected by the disease people have suffered. Probably, we can talk about some forecasts,” Alexey Agranovsky added.
So far, all the data suggest that coronavirus infection refers to “acute respiratory diseases, which in the vast majority of cases pass without a trace,” Voznesensky said.
Here it is necessary to look at the fact that the coronavirus is often superimposed on any pathology that a person used to have.
“For example, some pathologies of the vascular system in people who have had a coronavirus infection often occur in people with existing chronic diseases. Whether it’s venous insufficiency, whether it’s a tendency to self-education, whether it’s hypertension. I would not build a direct cause-and-effect relationship without some concomitant pathology,” the virologist said.
He recalled that some of those who have been ill have “postcovid syndrome” and such pathology is in the international classification of diseases.
“But to claim that an infection is a 100 percent fact of a decrease in life expectancy is somewhat far-fetched,” the scientist said.
Coronavirus, like the flu, is primarily a “shake-up and a test,” Alexey Agranovsky said in a conversation with RBC.
“In principle, if we talk about what may be, then, of course, the pathogen SARS-COV-2 has a serious chance of becoming a factor limiting life expectancy, because it acts on many organs, on many tissues. It causes a post-ovoid symptom, from this point of view, it can be considered theoretically as a factor limiting life expectancy,” he added.
However, according to Agranovsky, these are still “some assumptions” that have yet to be verified.