Long COVID isn’t any different to the symptoms people experience from other respiratory illnesses, a new study has found. In fact, researchers are recommending we ditch the term “long COVID” altogether.
By now, you’ve probably heard of long COVID. Maybe you’ve even been diagnosed with it. The more scientific term is post acute sequelae of COVID-19, and it refers to wide-ranging health conditions people experience after contracting the virus, which lasts for weeks, months or potentially years after catching the disease.
According to the Department of Health and Aged Care, the type of symptoms vary person-to-person, and can range from fatigue, to coughing and breathlessness, to chest pain, a lack of taste and smell, and even anxiety and mood issues. Less common symptoms include fevers, headaches, memory difficulties and muscle weakness, as well as digestive issues.
However, new research led by Queensland’s chief health officer Dr John Gerrard has found that long COVID might not need its own diagnosis at all — because apparently, it’s not any different to the symptoms that can hound you after catching the flu.
The study followed 2,400 people with COVID-19, and 2,700 people with other respiratory illnesses including influenza.
A year after the infection, 3% of the COVID patients reported having long COVID, compared to 4.1% of other respiratory illness patients who reported also having moderate to severe impairments.
After controlling for other variables, the researchers concluded there’s no evidence that COVID makes you more likely to experience these conditions than having other respiratory illnesses, and have called for the term long COVID to be scrapped.
“We believe it is time to stop using terms like ‘long COVID’,” Gerrard said, per The Sydney Morning Herald.
“They wrongly imply there is something unique and exceptional about longer-term symptoms associated with this virus. This terminology can cause unnecessary fear, and in some cases, hypervigilance to longer symptoms that can impede recovery.”
Gerrard’s research has not been published in a peer reviewed journal, and will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in April.
However, Professor of Medicine at Murdoch University Jeremy Nicholson thinks that an observational study based on patients’ self reports — without lab analyses to confirm the virus is physiologically different to other illnesses — is not enough to make such a big call.
So, for now, he reckons we’ll stick to using the term “long COVID”.
