Special Hospital Clinics are helping some former Covid-19 patients deal with lingering problems.

LOS ANGELES — Three days after being released from Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, Gilbert Torres returned on a stretcher, a clear tube snaking from his nose to an oxygen tank. It was the last place he wanted to be.

But Mr. Torres, 30, who had just spent two weeks on a ventilator in the intensive care unit, wasn’t there because his condition had worsened. He was there to visit a new outpatient clinic for Covid-19 survivors, intended to address their lingering physical and psychic wounds — and to help keep them from needing to be readmitted.

Several medical centers around the country, including Massachusetts General Hospital, have created similar clinics, a sign of an increasing appreciation of the need to address the long-term effects of Covid. Other hospitals that already had I.C.U. aftercare programs have added large numbers of Covid patients to their rolls: Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital, for example, has treated more than 100. And some institutions, like Providence St. Jude in Fullerton, Calif., have recovery programs that also serve coronavirus patients who were never hospitalized.

Well before the pandemic, doctors knew that some patients recovering from critical illness developed a constellation of symptoms known as post-intensive care syndrome that can include muscle weakness and fatigue. Depression, anxiety and cognitive impairments arise in about half of people who have spent time on ventilators in an I.C.U., studies suggest. About a quarter of these patients develop post-traumatic stress disorder. The risk is higher among those who have had respiratory failure, long hospital stays and treatment with drugs to sedate or paralyze them — all common in the sickest coronavirus patients. A new, peer-reviewed study of 45 former intensive care patients with Covid-19 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York found that more than 90 percent met criteria for the syndrome.

Dr. Prasso and his colleagues created the clinic at M.L.K. after realizing that many patients whose lives they had fought to save were getting little follow-up care. The hospital is in a low-income neighborhood where health services, inadequate even before the pandemic, have grown more scarce. ...