Long Covid: data for treatment are missing
health
The Austrian Health Insurance Fund and the Chamber of Labor criticize the lack of data for targeted long-Covid treatment. Because it is not clear how many people are affected by Long-Covid. The data from doctors and medical institutions would have to be merged.
Every tenth person suffering from Covid develops Long-Covid. This means that symptoms are still present four weeks after the illness. Medicine knows up to 200 different symptoms of long-Covid diseases. These include mental stress, breathing problems, organic diseases, chronic fatigue or persistent headaches. A lack of data makes it difficult to describe and classify the disease precisely.
In order to be able to better record and treat the disease, doctors and experts are now calling for better data networking, as does Andreas Huss, the employee representative of the Austrian Health Insurance Fund ÖGK: “Unfortunately, we do not yet have standardized diagnosis recording in the established area”.
Get privacy advocates involved
The head of the Salzburg Covid rehab and primary school of sports medicine, Josef Niebauer, also agrees with the demand for better data: “It is very important to summarize the data. If the collected data is not linked, it is worthless. Otherwise we cannot learn anything. Other countries can do it. We can take them as role models”. The ÖGK and the Chamber of Labor are therefore demanding that politicians introduce a data system for recording long-Covid cases – the concerns of data protection officers must also be taken into account
influence on the duration of the disease
The scientific linking of the data would above all help patients, for example with regard to the duration of the disease or life expectancy. According to statistics from the ÖGK, 90 percent of people suffering from long-Covid recover within three months.
Data on Long-Covid is missing
Experts call for the networking of long-Covid data