This month, when New York State, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, began releasing data on the top 10 chronic health problems suffered by people who died from coronavirus, asthma was notably absent from the list. “We’re not seeing a lot of patients with asthma,” said Dr. Bushra Mina, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, which has treated more than 800 Covid cases. One thing doctors agree on is that people with asthma should be taking long acting medications like steroids that keep their symptoms in check, because having your asthma under control is better than battling asthma and a virus simultaneously.Health experts have generally seen little to no evidence that asthma increases the risk of developing Covid-19, but the question has been whether it causes worse outcomes for those who do have it.Dr. Rogers said that she did not want to exclude asthma “as a potential problem as it is well known that viral infections are the No. 1 cause of asthma flares in both children and adults under normal conditions.” Dr. Juhn said the data would have to be studied and weighted in more detail, but added that, in his view, asthma put people at greater risk of poor outcomes, and potentially even more susceptible to infection, though there was limited data on the latter point. “It may be still fair to say that the emerging data support the current guidelines considering asthma as a high-risk condition,” he cautioned, adding that “we need more definite data.”
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/health/coronavirus-asthma-risk.html
