SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Nov. 12 (EUROPA PRESS) –
More than 9,500 canaries suffer from the so-called ‘persistent covid’ in the islands, around 10% of the people affected by the coronavirus pandemic, although the figure may be double, he pointed out this Friday in the Health Committee of the Parliament of Canarias, the spokesperson for the affected association, Inmaculada Pérez del Toro.
Before the parliamentary groups, he has detailed that people with persistent covid have on average more than thirty symptoms, including chronic fatigue, myalgia, facial paralysis, mental fog or cognitive impairment.
“It is a weight of 20 or 30 years more, it is as if you were 80 years old,” he stressed, underlining that it was infected in March 2020, in the first wave of the coronavirus.
Pérez del Toro has lamented the “loneliness” that this group suffers because ‘it does not exist’ for the Ministry of Health, since there is no registry of affected or care protocols, as some autonomous communities do have.
In addition, it has called for more training for health professionals because many diagnose them with anxiety disorders when what they need are tests.
He has also criticized the lack of specific rehabilitation programs and the long waiting lists, since in his specific case, for example, it takes more than a year to receive respiratory rehabilitation. “It is a shame what we have,” he pointed out.
For this reason, they ask for the creation of multidisciplinary work units to give “comprehensive care” to the sick and for more funds to be allocated to research. “We cannot do rehabilitation in our homes, we need to be guided”, he commented.
In the labor field, he has requested that disabilities and adaptation to the job be regulated.
Pérez del Toro has also criticized that the patients who were hospitalized at least have an appointment with the pulmonologist while the rest end up on the waiting list.
The Minister of Health, Blas Trujillo, has committed to developing the protocols in the first semester of next year once the coordination work with professionals and patient associations is completed.
