• Experts say COVID-19 survivors with long-term symptoms need urgent attention,
There is an urgent need to address long-term symptoms of the coronavirus, leading public health officials said this week, warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people worldwide might experience lingering problems that could impede their ability to work and function normally.
In a two-day meeting Thursday and Friday — the federal government’s first workshop dedicated to longterm COVID-19 — public health officials, medical researchers and patients said the condition needed to be recognized as a syndrome, given a name and taken seriously by doctors.
“This is a phenomenon that is really quite real and quite extensive,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, at the conference Thursday.
While the number of people affected is still unknown, he said, if long-term symptoms afflict even a small proportion of the millions of people infected with the coronavirus, it is “going to represent a significant public health issue.”
Such symptoms — ranging from breathing trouble to heart issues to cognitive and psychological problems — are already plaguing an untold number of people worldwide. Even for people who were never sick enough to be hospitalized, the aftermath can be long and grueling, with a complex and lasting mix of symptoms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently posted a list of some long-term symptoms — fatigue, joint pain, chest pain, brain fog, depression — but doctors and researchers said they still know little about the extent or cause of many of the problems, which patients will develop them or how to address them.
Over the past several months, coronavirus patients with lingering, debilitating health issues have been widely referred to as “COVID long-haulers.” But some survivors and experts feel that name trivializes the experience, lessening its importance as a medical syndrome that doctors and insurers should recognize, diagnose and treat. One of the pressing issues that patients and experts are now weighing is what official medical term should be adopted to describe the collection of post-COVID-19 symptoms.
“We need to dig in and do the work that needs to be done to help relieve the suffering and stop this madness,” said Dr. Michael Haag, an infectious-disease expert from the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was a co-chair of a session.
In an inadvertent but stark illustration of the difficulty of the recovery process, two of the four patients scheduled to speak at the meeting were unable to because they had been hospitalized again.
“Those individuals had their acute illness several months ago, and they’ve been suffering pretty mightily since then,” Dr. Haag said. “And the fact that they’re still struggling with this gives extra power to what we’re trying to do today.”
Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer of the CDC’s COVID-19 response, said he expected long-term postCOVID-19 symptoms would affect “on the order of tens of thousands in the United States and possibly hundreds of thousands.”