How Long COVID May Actually Be Twice The Problem Previously Believed

Long COVID is no picnic. See for example: How To Triple Your Chances Of Getting The “Razorblade Throat” COVID Variant Or Long COVID

And for that matter, here’s an interesting guest article: Can you die from long COVID? The answer is not so simple

Actually, the answer is quite simple:

• In practical terms, it’s “yes”.
• In pedantic terms, it’s much like how technically nobody dies of AIDS (one gets AIDS, one’s immune system flatlines, and then one dies of pneumonia, or flu, or a cold, or something like that).
  • So, on the books, people aren’t directly dying of long COVID, they’re dying of other things because they have long COVID which has compromised their ability to deal with the other things.

See also: falling doesn’t kill anyone!

What kills people is other events that transpire after falling (i.e., starting from when you stop falling).

With that in mind, onto the main topic for today…

At a certain point in the COVID pandemic, various governments stopped tracking cases. If we were to be cynical, we might hypothesize that it was because the numbers were making them look bad.

However, scientists have still done their best to keep track, and that goes for long COVID, too:

Long COVID, wide effects

Researchers (Dr. Jiazi Tian et al.) analyzed electronic health records from 457,950 adults with COVID across 58 US hospitals, and used a “precision phenotyping” system to identify long COVID cases that were missed by standard diagnostic coding.

Bad news: they found that 16.28% of COVID patients developed post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (“PASC”, more commonly called long COVID), or in other words, about 1 in 6 people.

Why this matters: tracking has largely relied on inadequate coding, which previously identified fewer than 7% of patients. This latest study therefore strongly suggests* that the true burden of long COVID may be more than double commonly reported estimates.

^{*In practical terms, it outright indicates this. But we will use the language the researchers used when describing their conclusions, and scientists are cautious sorts who say such things as “mounting evidence suggests that water may be wet; further research is warranted”.}

To take it further, and look at the knock-on effects and what this means for the individual with long COVID: among the 74,560 identified long COVID cases, 66,587 people (89.31%) developed at least one chronic condition requiring ongoing management.

A lot of this has previously flown under the radar, because while many people have been receiving medical care for new symptoms and diseases after COVID infection, those conditions are often recorded separately, rather than being recognized and recorded as part of long COVID. As a result, health systems and policymakers have tended to underestimate the scale of the problem.

Further, and perhaps even more concerningly, the study also found that long COVID prevalence has continued to increase over time rather than declining. This has thus been presented as evidence of an accumulating burden of chronic illness, rather than a temporary legacy of the early pandemic.

You can read the paper itself, here: Long COVID Persistence and Surveillance Gaps Across 58 US Hospitals

Want to learn more?

Check out:

What Can Be Done About Long COVID? ← scientists have found a possible cure, a procedure known as epipharyngeal abrasive therapy, which as enjoyable as it sounds, and is not yet proven to cure it completely (although to give it its due, the science so far really is promising)

Take care!