Evidence is mounting about how the virus damages organs other than the lungs, causing long-term effects

(Originally published Sept. 29 in “What in the World“) As the world averts its weary gaze away from the ebbing surge in cases of Covid-19’s Delta strain, evidence keeps mounting of how the virus may not be one we can live with.

A new study at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences corroborates early studies suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t necessarily a respiratory virus at all, but a vascular one infecting any epithelial tissue, which enables it to disrupt a host of tissues, including not just the lungs, but also the heart, the kidneys and even the brain. The new study found that Covid can infect the cells of the pancreas, affecting their ability to produce insulin and thereby leave victims with temporary or even seemingly permanent diabetes.

Worse, more than one in three people who get Covid experience long-term effects including breathing and abdominal problems. They also experience anxiety and depression—symptoms shared by people trying to abid by the thicket of regulations to keep them from getting infected. And Covid doesn’t just disrupt the lives of those it infects, but also those of the people they are responsible for, especially children.

That’s true of any disease, of course, but Covid’s prevalence has allowed the pandemic to cut a much wider swathe of economic and social damage than the raw death toll might suggest. And at nearly 4.8 million and counting, that death toll Covid is taking remains so high that the pandemic cut global life expectancies in 2020 by the most since World War II. It’s no surprise, then, to hear from the UN’s Conference on Trade and Development that the pandemic is reversing progress against poverty in the world’s poorest nations.

The good news is that the Delta surge is convincing more people in the United States (which has had the worst response to the pandemic and thus done the most to lengthen its global duration) to overcome their initial objections and get vaccinated against Covid. This is helping to close a stark racial gap in vaccination rates. More people, according to Politico, are also taking advantage of the broad recommendations on who should get a booster shot to roll up for a third injection. Politico estimates that the government’s guidelines are so wide that virtually every one of the 100 million Americans who received Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines may be eligible to get a booster.