People who became ill during other pandemics went on to develop ‘significant’ mental health trauma – including PTSD – and doctors fear the same could happen with coronavirus.
A meeting of Tameside’s Clinical Commissioning Group governing body (CCG) heard that in previous outbreaks, a fifth of people who had contracted illnesses later also suffered mental health problems.
These include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic of 2003, which affected 26 countries and infected 8,000 people.
By contrast, Covid-19 has seen 12m people contract the virus worldwide, and more than half a million deaths.
A GP told the meeting that the number of people coming to A&E in mental health crisis at Tameside Hospital was increasing again after a drop-off during lockdown.
Dr Vinny Khunger said: “Evidence from previous pandemics, so more local pandemics, SARS in the early 2000s and MERS soon after 2010 shows that 20pc of people who developed those illnesses went on to develop in some cases fairly significant mental health conditions.
“So things like PTSD. The impact of mental health going forward is going to be pretty massive.
“Looking back over the last couple of months and discussions with A&E at the hospital, they saw a significant decrease initially in mental health presentations compared to normal.
“But subsequently now, particularly over the last three weeks or so, those presentations have increased significantly again.
“And interestingly more so actually not the same people who go round the system, these are new people presenting to A&E.
“It’s something we’re going to need to think about a lot over the next few months.”
Fellow governing body member, Dr Christine Ahmed added that the pandemic and lockdown would also have an effect on the mental health of children.
“I think we often talk a lot about adult mental health but the impact for children has probably been absolutely massive because it’s the whole family that’s affected and not being in school,” she said.
“This is a long term approach we need to look at and if there are further waves I think that will have an even bigger impact really.”
