Patients with severe symptoms of Covid-19 who develop diabetes during hospitalisation may only have a temporary form of the disease with their blood sugar levels returning to normal afterward, a new study has claimed. Researchers studied 594 patients showing signs of diabetes during hospitalisation for Covid-19 treatment. The volunteers included 78 patients with no previous diabetes diagnosis.

Compared to patients who had pre-existing conditions, many of the patients newly diagnosed with diabetes had less severe blood sugar issues. However, they had more serious Covid-19 symptoms.

Forty per cent of these patients went back to blood sugar levels below the diabetes cutoff roughly a year after leaving hospitals, the researchers reported in the Journal of Diabetes and Its Complications.

Co-author Dr Sara Cromer of the Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital said that this suggested that the new diabetes diagnosis might be transitory and related to the acute stress of being infected with Covid-19, Reuters reported.

The results suggest that insulin deficiency, in case it occurred, is not permanent in general, Dr Cromer said. She added that these patients might only need insulin or other similar medications for a brief period and it was critical that physicians closely followed them to see when their conditions improved.

RACIAL DISPARITIES AND OMICRON

The jump in Omicron-led infections in the US and the heavier toll on minority communities is the latest example of racial disparity during the pandemic, according to new data.

For every 2,000 people in the US, roughly one per day was infected for the first time when the Delta variant was dominant. When Omicron took over as the dominant strain, about 8 to 10 per day were infected in January, researchers found.

Racial disparities further widened with Omicron, the researchers reported on medRxiv, ahead of peer review.

During the Delta strain’s dominance, the infection rate among Black patients was 1.3 to 1.4 times greater than white patients. With Omicron, the rate of infection jumped to 3 to 4 times higher, Reuters reported. Among Hispanics, the rate of Delta infection was 1.6 to 1.8 times higher than non-Hispanics. This number grew to three times higher with Omicron.

The Omicron strain also hit children. The rate of infection in January in children under 5 was the highest at 22 a day per 2,000.

The findings were drawn from 733,509 Delta cases and 147,964 Omicron cases. The Omicron variant, however, caused significantly lower emergency visits, hospitalisations, intensive care unit admissions, and mechanical ventilation requirement. Emergency visits and intensive care requirement were still higher among Hispanics and Blacks. The researchers found that the subjects might not be representative of all patients in the US.