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A multidisciplinary team of researchers associated with Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria conducted an observational prospective study on the cardiopulmonary damage in 145 patients recovering from hospitalization due to COVID-19. 100 days after confirmed diagnosis, 41% of patients had persistent symptoms such as dyspnea (Figure 1) and 21% had a reduced diffusing lung capacity (p<0.001; Table 2), and 63% of patients had bilateral ground-glass opacities and/or reticulation in lower long lobes as seen on CT scans (Figure 2). Improvements in symptoms and CT findings were noted at 100 days compared to 60 days post-onset, but there was still significant cardiopulmonary damage indicating that the effects of COVID-19 may persist for a considerable period of time after recovery; further research is necessary to investigate the duration and severity of these effects.

A multicenter prospective observational cohort study conducted by researchers from multiple medical institutions in Switzerland enrolled 113 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 between May 1 - September 15, 2020 and monitored respiratory outcomes 4 months later (Figure 1). Patients who had severe/critical COVID-19 had significantly lower TLC, FVC, FEV1, and DLCO compared to those with mild/moderate disease (Figure 2), and patients with severe/critical COVID-19 were more likely to have mosaic attenuation pattern with hypo-attenuated areas (66% versus 13%, p=0.007), reticulations (59% versus 13%, p=0.02), and architectural distortion (52% versus 13%, p=0.055) (Figure 3). DLCO was the strongest independent factor associated with previous severe/critical disease, suggesting that systematic follow-up of pulmonary function is essential for patients who recover from severe and critical COVID-19 and DLCO is the single most important factor at 4-month follow-up.

Neonatologists and women's health experts from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden studied a prospective cohort of 88,159 infants delivered to mothers who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between March 2020 and January 2021 using Swedish patient registries. Compared to infants born to healthy mothers in the same time frame, these infants were more likely to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (11.7 vs 8.4%; odds ratio [OR], 1.47; 95%CI, 1.26-1.70) or have respiratory distress syndrome (1.2 vs 0.5%; OR, 2.40; 95%CI, 1.50-3.84), any neonatal respiratory disorder (2.8 vs 2.0%; OR, 1.42; 95%CI, 1.07-1.90), and hyperbilirubinemia (3.6 vs 2.5%; OR, 1.47; 95%CI, 1.13-1.90)(Figure 2). Authors suggest neonates born to SARS-CoV-2 mothers are at higher risk for complications, though due to limitations in the data (imbalanced testing, heterogeneity of maternal disease severity) recommend further research into virally-altered prognosis and outcomes for newborns.

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