TAMPA, Fla. — There’s now new research giving insight into long COVID and how the virus is affecting people’s health, long after the initial COVID-19 infection.
“A lot of people, I think, at the start, were thinking that long COVID wasn’t real,” said Dr. Jill Roberts, Associate Professor for the USF College of Public Health.
But health officials said there are now years of concrete evidence showing that long COVID is real.
“There’s been so many pathology studies showing that we can get real data that shows that there are inflammation responses occurring months later to the COVID antigens,” said Roberts.
According to the CDC, one in nine adults in the United States who’ve had a COVID-19 infection continues to experience long COVID, and the symptoms are wide-ranging, affecting all different parts of the body that vary from person to person.
“All of these things that seem unrelated in terms of the different disease manifestations are actually caused by the same thing,” said Dr. Thomas Unnasch, public health expert and researcher.
Some of the symptoms include shortness of breath, brain fog, depression, anxiety and fatigue.
A new study also shows that insomnia could be linked to long COVID, too.
“Sleep disorder type of things, issues with long-term sadness—they’re calling it the COVID sadness, in fact,” said Roberts.
Another recent study said about one in 10 pregnant women will develop long-term symptoms if they get infected during pregnancy. A new pediatrics report found that up to six million children have developed COVID.
“Long COVID in children, which we didn’t really expect to be a thing,” said Roberts.
The data suggest that most young people who have long COVID eventually recover.
Overall, health officials said vaccines help the severity of COVID-19 symptoms, which could help with long COVID.
“I think it’s really important that finally, we’re really recognizing this is a long-term syndrome that a lot of people are going to be affected by,” said Unnasch.
However, only time will tell the extent to which the virus is affecting people long-term and if a full recovery is possible for everyone.
“We’ve had tracking data for a couple of years now. Some people are recovering. So some of those common symptoms like brain fog and things like that are disappearing over time. So I’m hopeful that that will be the case for most people,” said Roberts.