Editorial: Covid complications must be taken seriously

Westmoreland County Commissioner Sean Kertes isn’t an old man.

He doesn’t have a long list of the kind of health problems that can make it easier to get sick — things like diabetes or heart disease. He isn’t obese. He is young, healthy and hard to keep down.

But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t catch covid-19.

He did catch it. It wasn’t a bad case. Kertes is, after all, just 34 and is active and busy. He had a pretty mild case of the disease and bounced back to regular life.

But much like the disease, the related complications don’t care about who they attack. The commissioner was hit with one that is both too common and too dangerous. Blood clots. In Kertes’ case, they were in the form of pulmonary embolisms that prompted a healthy young man to take blood thinners and have made it hard to take on stairs.

This is the danger of the coronavirus pandemic that the already startling death counts — topping 379,000 nationwide — don’t fully express.

The initial sickness, which might be mild such as Kertes’, is only the first hurdle. Side effects like blood clots or bleeding can pop up later.

“There is going to be a burden of illness for those who are going to come back and require treatment for medical conditions,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Amesh Adalja said. “This is going to be a long tail of conditions that we’re going to be dealing with for some time.”

That makes it all the more important to minimize spread of covid, as right now we don’t know what the effects will be years down the road instead of just weeks or months. The relatively mild childhood disease chicken pox can lead to the painful, debilitating shingles decades later. Will covid patients have similar issues in the future?

And because of that, it’s important to be honest about how the virus affects people today.

Kertes has been frank about his experience, which is as beneficial to his neighbors as wearing a mask and staying six feet away. It’s also a great example for an elected official to set. Medical experts have their place, but testimony from a leading local public figure can be even more persuasive.

“I try to stay fit. I’ve never been on medication, never had surgery and had no underlying conditions. For me to go from that to being exhausted all the time is just frightening,” Kertes said. “I’d tell anyone if you don’t feel right, go to the doctor or the emergency room. That’s what they are there for.”