Corona virus endangers heart patients twice – more diseases, less therapy

Berlin Cardiologists warned early on that the corona pandemic would grip people with heart disease from two sides. And they were right.

On the one hand, the corona viruses not only affect the lungs, but also the cardiovascular system – and in several ways. At the Charité, for example, evidence of concomitant damage to the heart muscle was observed in up to a third of all Covid 19 patients.

“In the case of patients who are not admitted to hospital, this is initially mostly mild, but it can be accompanied by myocarditis, cardiac arrhythmia and, in individual cases, myocardial insufficiency, leading to the so-called long Covid syndrome with cardiac involvement,” says Burkert Pieske, Director of the Medical Clinic with Focus on cardiology at the Charité. A cardiological long-Covid special outpatient clinic has been set up at the German Heart Center Berlin for these patients in particular.

Overall, we treated around 50 percent fewer patients during the Corona period. Burkert Pieske, director of the clinic specializing in cardiology at the Charité