Long COVID, which refers to post-acute and chronic sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, can affect nearly every organ system and all demographic groups. The high and growing toll of long COVID calls for an urgent need to understand how to prevent and treat it. Governments and health systems must address the care needs of people with long COVID.
Shortly after the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, reports emerged showing that some individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 developed persistent symptoms and new health problems that arose long after the acute phase of infection and could not be explained by other factors1. The patient community who, to their credit, first recognized and reported this new syndrome used the term ‘long COVID’ to describe the post-acute and chronic sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection1. Long COVID can affect people across the lifespan — children, young adults and older adults — and across sex, race and ethnicity, and baseline health status2. Importantly, this syndrome not only affects patients who had severe COVID-19, but is also observed in individuals who were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
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Source: Al-Aly, Z., Agarwal, A., Alwan, N. et al. Long COVID: long-term health outcomes and implications for policy and research. Nat Rev Nephrol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41581-022-00652-2 (Full text)