For people rendered critically ill by coronavirus, the road to recovery will be long and difficult.
Doctors are already weighing up the the aftermath of COVID-19, and how the NHS and social care can help survivors fully rehabilitate.
Even though the UK is more than three months into the health crisis, experts can’t confidently say what the long-lasting impact of Covid will be for some survivors.
Like other people who have been critically ill in intensive care, recovery from the physical and psychological trauma of the virus will be another battle for some patients.
Dougal Atkinson is a consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine at the Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI), part of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
For the last three months Dr Atkinson has been working on the frontline of the pandemic caring for Covid patients in the MRI's intensive care unit (ICU).
Dr Atkinson says it can take months for anyone who has been critically ill to recover from the physical and mental strains put on the body while in intensive care.

Many patients admitted to intensive care units (ICU) for health complications related to the new coronavirus have experienced hospital delirium, a condition that causes hallucinations, confusion and other cognition issues.

It has long been known that patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are at higher risk of systemic throm-boembolism than is the general population. In fact, patients with both ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD) have a 3- to 4-fold higher number of throm-boembolic events including pulmonary embolism and a 6-fold higher incidence found at autopsy.1 It has been hypothesized that prothrombotic genetic variants may be more prevalent in IBD patients than in the general population. Bernstein et al identified 492 IBD patients from the Manitoba IBD Research Registry and 412 controls from Manitoba Health’s administrative data-base. Subjects filled out questionnaires and their records were reviewed to determine their demographics, diagnosis, environmental factors, family history, smoking history, IBD phenotype, and extent and location of disease. All participants donated blood for genetic analysis, and most were contacted 2 years after venipuncture to update their history of throm-boembolic events. Subjects’ blood was analyzed for the 4 most common genetic mutations associated with the risk of thrombosis.