Long Covid

Researchers analyzed 2022 data from the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys completed by 108,237 COVID-19 survivors who did or didn't have persistent symptoms. Participants' health-related quality of life (HRQL) was assessed via SRGH, self-reported mental and physical health, and efficiency in completing activities of daily life.

Of all participants, 35% were aged 18 to 34 years, 46.5% were men, and 22.7% had long COVID, also known as post-COVID condition (PCC), defined as having lingering symptoms at least 3 months post-infection.

Long COVID is an everyone problem because everyone has blood vessels, a gut microbiome, ACE-2 receptors, T cells and a blood-brain barrier. I wanted to demystify the words so finally they become real, and a part of you.

Long COVID is simply what happens when someone does not recover from COVID. It’s not imaginary, and it’s not even particularly mysterious. It is complicated, because bodies are complicated, and the virus is doing strange, fascinating things, going through forbidden doorways, entering sacred chambers.

Long COVID is blood vessel damage, brain damage, organ damage, immune system damage, and mitochondrial damage. It is real, it is devastating, and it is happening to people every day. And it can happen to you, after any infection.

Could you have Long COVID and not know it? Possibly, according to a leading Long COVID physician-epidemiologist who explains what the condition is and how it has impacted millions of people around the world. We also meet someone living with Long COVID who shares what the experience has been like for them. More than 400 million people (and counting) are affected by Long COVID around the world. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly is a physician-epidemiologist and TIME 100 Health awardee in St. Louis. He is one of the world’s leading Long COVID researchers. As we approach the grim 5th anniversary of the COVID pandemic, he joins Daniella on Public Health is Dead to outline a major public health challenge of our time: If we don't die, what happens to many of us after we survive a COVID infection? Especially if we keep getting reinfected? Dr. Al-Aly explains what listening to patients allows the best researchers to do, addresses some of the common rebuttals to his team’s study data, and shares his recommendations to help turn this public health failure around.

We get to know Hazie Thompson, a former cook who has been living with Long COVID in Toronto since 2020 – they share how the condition has affected them and what they would like healthcare providers to know. The stakes of ignoring Long COVID are high.

People with Long COVID have been dismissed and ignored to everyone’s disadvantage because more people keep joining the ranks. There’s a lot of research. There are a lot of reports. But our public health leaders are pretty quiet about what Long COVID can do to us. Something’s getting lost in translation. And you deserve to know.

I had heard of the life-altering fatigue of long Covid, which turned doing the dishes into a marathon requiring several breaks and a nap. I didn’t know, however, that the illness would trigger in me a painful allergic reaction to sunshine, or trigeminal neuralgia (imagine wearing an electric fishnet as a mask), or the dozen other bizarre symptoms that left me feeling as if an essential screw holding me together had come loose.

I became housebound overnight. I was 37. Loving your partner “in sickness” sounds noble, romantic even. In reality, it’s gut wrenching.

Among the current generation of kids, many are growing up with their mother or father confined to bed or confined to bed themselves. According to a study by ANU, long COVID is hitting up to an estimated 20% of Australians three months after they contracted COVID — mostly women, but also men and children. In the current COVID wave, that means a lot of people coming down sick for a long time.

Long COVID is keeping people from their jobs and their lives, and as COVID cases continue, it is unclear whether the rate of new long COVID cases is increasing faster than the old cases recover.