Long COVID

People around us are catching COVID. Everyone we know is vaxxed and boosted and so staying out of the hospital and the morgue. One thing I've been asking them is about the recovery and any evidence for long COVID. So far, I don't know anyone with long COVID.

So how common is long COVID? Claims vary, but the problems include the definition of long COVID and the choice of a control group, since many long COVID symptoms can occur in uninfected people as well.

Here's an explainer. BTW, I used to meet with Dr. Al-Aly regularly back when I was Associate Dean for Research. Very energetic guy.

"Researcher Ziyad Al-Aly and his colleagues have been able to rely on a unique and large source of data to work around some of these issues: people who get their health care covered by the federal government through Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health care system in the U.S. Last November, his team published a study trying to gauge the burden of long covid symptoms on patients. Their data made it possible for them to compare nearly 200,000 covid-19 survivors to 5 million people who never tested positive for covid-19 during the study period, and to compare their symptoms across different levels of initial illness.

"Even patients who only had mild illness at first, the team found, had an increased risk of health problems beyond the first 30 days after infection, compared to controls, though the risk was highest for severe cases. Subsequent studies of theirs with the same dataset have found that long covid patients have a greater risk of heart problems. But they also estimated that the overall prevalence of prolonged symptoms in survivors that could be connected to covid was around 7%, and around 4% for initially milder cases.

“Having a control group and trying to account for baseline health conditions is very, very important,” Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, told Gizmodo by phone. “That’s how we can start to scientifically and rigorously disentangle the consequences of SARS-CoV-2 from everything else that may be happening in people’s lives.”

https://gizmodo.com/how-common-is-long-covid-1849130767