German scientist warns COVID-19 'will increase the incidence of heart failure over the next decades'

The more that medical experts research COVID-19 — a disease that wasn’t reported until December 2019 but has since killed more than 857,800 people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers — the more they realize how dangerous it is. And a German study, according to Scientific American, found that the COVID-19 coronavirus can cause heart damage even if one is asymptomatic.

Medical experts have been reporting for months that someone who has been infected with COVID-19 but has no symptoms can easily infect someone else. Those who have no symptoms — no coughing, no sneezing, no fatigue, nothing — are typically described as milder cases. But the German study indicates that COVID-19 isn’t necessarily harmless to someone who is asymptomatic. And Elike Nagel, lead investigator for that study, warned, “My personal take is that COVID will increase the incidence of heart failure over the next decades.”

The study found that cardiac inflammation was common in COVID-19 patients, including those who had either mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.

Scientific American’s Dr. Carolyn Barber, who has been an emergency physician for 25 years, notes that the German study “found that 78% of recovered COVID-19 patients, the majority of whom had only mild to moderate symptoms, demonstrated cardiac involvement more than two months after their initial diagnoses. Six in 10 were found to have persistent myocardial inflammation.”

Barber notes that according to the medical journal The Lancet, children are not immune to heart damage from COVID-19. In August, The Lancet reported that an 11-year-old died after suffering from coronavirus-related heart failure.