“Our findings emphasise the critical importance of paying attention to kidney function and disease in caring for patients who have had Covid-19,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Washington University.

“If kidney care isn’t an integral part of Covid-19 post-acute care strategy, then we will miss opportunities to help potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have no idea that their kidney function has declined due to this virus,” Al-Aly added.

The researchers created a controlled dataset that included health information from more than 1.7 million healthy and Covid-infected older adults from March 1, 2020, through March 15, 2021.

The team also analysed data that included 1,51,289 women — including 8,817 with Covid-19 — and adults of all ages.