Much about the chronic condition remains unclear nearly 3 years into the pandemic<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Authhors: \u00a0Daniel de Vis\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0| Oct. 20, 2022 Changing America<\/p>\n\n\n\n After two years of research and one of the largest public health campaigns in human history, doctors and scientists don\u2019t yet have a test to detect the mysterious affliction called long COVID-19, let alone a head count of the afflicted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on the latest wave of studies, long COVID-19 may beset 4 percent of the population who catch the virus, or 14.8 percent, or 48 percent. Its toll on the body spans dozens of possible symptoms, from fatigue to chest pains to fuzzy thinking to hair loss. The symptoms overlap with those seen in scores of other illnesses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many long COVID-19 cases clear up after several months or a year. Some seem to be permanent. Only time will tell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat do we mean when we say long COVID? We\u2019re still figuring it out,\u201d said Dr. Josh Fessel, a senior clinical adviser and COVID-19 specialist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Along the way, he said, \u201cwe\u2019re learning a lot about what recovery looks like after a significant illness.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n A long COVID-19 stud<\/a>y released last week<\/a> by Scottish researchers raised eyebrows around the globe. Six to 18 months after COVID-19 infection, 48 percent of people surveyed said they had not fully recovered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That report is an outlier. The World Health Organization put<\/a>s the prevalence<\/a> of long COVID-19 at 10 to 20 percent. Other recent estimates range across the map. An ongoing survey by British health officials, updated in July, found long COVID-19 in only 4 percent of cases. A Canadian government survey, updated this week, found that 14.8 percent of adults with COVID-19 retained symptoms three months after infection. A U.S. government survey, updated this month, found that 30 percent of adults who had the coronavirus believed they had experienced long COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For many Americans, long COVID-19 now looms as a larger worry than acute COVID-19, the first round of disease triggered by the viral invader. Vaccinations and weakening variants have vastly lowered the odds that people without underlying conditions will wind up hospitalized or dead from the acute version of the ailment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t talk about just getting COVID any more,\u201d said Tara Leytham Powell, professor of social work at the University of Illinois. \u201cLong COVID is more of a fear.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ashley Drapeau caught COVID-19 in December 2020. A month later, she said, \u201cit just seemed like it wasn\u2019t getting any better. I was still having shortness of breath. I was having migraines. \u2026 Lack of appetite, nausea. It seemed to go on and on.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Drapeau took most of 2021 off. Now she\u2019s back at work, running a long COVID-19 program at the George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine. She\u2019s operating at \u201cabout 80 percent.\u201d She has never fully recovered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In calculating the prevalence of long COVID-19, researchers struggle to gather basic data. There is no way to conclusively diagnose long COVID-19, so most research relies on self-reported information obtained through surveys. Respondents don\u2019t always know if they had COVID-19. They can only guess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s no test. There\u2019s no way to evaluate it,\u201d said Dr. Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. \u201cYou can only ask people to report it themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Duggal works on an ongoing long COVID-19 survey at Johns Hopkins, a project that began with the first reports of lingering illness in the spring of 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe expected there would be a long-term consequence,\u201d she said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t expecting what we\u2019re seeing now.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hopkins researchers have found that one-third of patients report symptoms of long COVID-19. A much smaller group, around 3 percent, was identified as suffering from severe long COVID-19, \u201cmeaning that they can\u2019t function in their day-to-day life,\u201d Duggal said. \u201cThey can no longer walk a quarter of a mile, or up a flight of stairs. Can\u2019t do things like vacuum. It affects their ability to do their jobs, take kids to school.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though researchers have not reached consensus on some of the specifics, they generally agree that long COVID-19 is a constellation of symptoms that can endure for months or years after infection, sometimes emerging after an illusory recovery. The most common symptoms seem to be fatigue, shortness of breath and that blurry mental state known as COVID fog. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers often file long COVID-19 sufferers into two groups. The smaller contingent, perhaps 1 to 5 percent of all coronavirus cases, suffer symptoms so severe that they \u201ccan\u2019t live normal lives,\u201d Duggal said. The larger camp of COVID-19 \u201clong-haulers,\u201d somewhere between 5 and 50 percent of all cases, manifest relatively mild symptoms that don\u2019t hinder daily routines of work, school, shopping and sleep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some in that camp may not have long COVID-19 at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Scottish study, 91 percent of people who believed they had long COVID-19 reported one or more symptoms associated with the affliction. But at least one of the same symptoms appeared in more than half of the group that had never caught COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people confuse essentially random symptoms with resurgent COVID-19, experts say. Others could be coping with the vagaries of recovery from a serious illness. Still others may be fighting symptoms that linger mostly in the mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA lot of these are symptoms of depression and anxiety,\u201d said Dr. Steven Dubovsky, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Buffalo. \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s a population of people who got sick and stayed sick for complicated psychological reasons. That doesn\u2019t mean they aren\u2019t sick.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n One problem with diagnosing long COVID-19 lies in the bewildering array of symptoms. One recent Dutch study counted 23<\/a>. More common: loss of taste and smell, muscle pain, back pain, headache and lethargy. Less common: \u201cheavy arms and legs,\u201d stomach pain, diarrhea and tingling extremities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe talk about long COVID like it\u2019s a thing,\u201d said Fessel of NIH. \u201cAnd I think the truth is that what we\u2019re learning, and what we\u2019ve had a sense of for a while, is that there are different flavors of long COVID. It seems like there are some people who really have a lot of the fatigue, the cognitive changes. \u2026 There are people who don\u2019t have much of that, but they\u2019re really short of breath with activity levels that never used to bother them, and that persists for months. There are people with real high heart rates. All of these fall under the umbrella of long COVID.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n One uncertainty lies in the very definition of \u201clong.\u201d Some researchers define long COVID-19 as symptoms enduring past three or four weeks. Others draw the line at three months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another imponderable: Fickle public interest in COVID-19 surveys. People who haven\u2019t recovered from the virus may be more likely to answer a long COVID-19 survey than people who have. Educated white women, in particular, seem to answer these surveys at markedly higher rates than people in other demographic groups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all the news about long COVID-19 is bad. One good tiding: Keeping up with vaccines seems to reduce the chances of contracting long COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n U.K. health officials have found encouraging signs that weaker variants, as well, correlate to lower rates of long COVID-19. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur research and other research have found that if you\u2019re fully vaccinated, your risk of having long COVID 12 weeks after an omicron infection is about half what it was with delta,\u201d said Daniel Ayoubkhani, principal statistician at the U.K. Office for National Statistics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Other researchers disagree. And even if the rate of long COVID-19 decreases over time, owing to vaccination or milder variants, the sheer number of infections should guarantee a steady stream of long COVID cases for a long time to come. The impact of those cases, on individuals and on society, could be massive. One recent stud<\/a>y suggests long COVID-19<\/a> may have already sidelined 4 million American workers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s over $100 billion a year, in terms of lost wages,\u201d said Drapeau, of George Washington University. \u201cThat\u2019s a pretty big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much about the chronic condition remains unclear nearly 3 years into the pandemic Authhors: \u00a0Daniel de Vis\u00e9\u00a0| Oct. 20, 2022 Changing America Story at a glance The lack of diagnostic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,169,815,187,997,289,290,950,561,567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-19","category-fatigure","category-gastrointestinal-symptoms-covid-19","category-gastrointestinal","category-lethargy","category-long-haul-disease","category-long-term-effects","category-smell-taste","category-symptoms-covid-19","category-taste-smell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Story at a glance<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n