What is long COVID and how to manage it?

MORE than just a short-term infection, COVID-19 can cause devastating physically and mentally impact for months or years after infection.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), some people may face long-term effects of COVID-19, even if the initial illness was mild, or if they had no initial symptoms.

Here’s what we know about long COVID.


What is Long COVID?

• Long COVID refers to a condition when people continue to experience the symptoms of COVID-19 for much longer than usual and do not completely recover after first getting infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

• Other terms for long COVID include post-COVID, post-acute COVID, long-tail COVID, and long-haul COVID (long haulers).

• The condition can last for weeks or months, and perhaps longer.

Who is most at risk?

• It is still not clear who is most at risk of developing long COVID, though it appears to be unrelated to the initial severity of the infection. 

• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long COVID can affect people who had only mild cases of COVID-19 and even those who were asymptomatic. t is mildly connected to age, which means adolescents and children are also at risk.

• However, some experts believe there is evidence that long COVID is likely to happen after severe COVID-19 or symptomatic infection. Dr Monica Gandhi, a University of California, San Francisco infectious disease expert says, “true long COVID symptoms are more common after symptomatic or severe disease.”

• Scientists are yet to be able to determine how many people eventually endure from the prolonged symptoms and why exactly it happens or whether any specific population is more at risk.

• According to Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of CDC, “is continuing to work to identify how common these longer-term effects are, who is the most likely to get them and whether symptoms eventually resolve.”

• Malaysia’s Health Ministry says that ‘research on more than a thousand patients showed that 66 percent of category 4 and 5 COVID-19 patients suffer post-COVID syndromes.’


What causes Long COVID?

• According to Gandhi, one possible justification is that the body’s immune reaction to COVID-19 virus creates “a massive inflammatory reaction you get to try to fight the virus.”

• Gandhi said that symptomatic or intense infection can generate the kind of “disorganised, innate, inflammatory response” that may sooner or later cause long COVID.

• However, Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said treatment offered would be based on the symptoms displayed.

• Dr Noor Hisham said, Malaysia will carry out clinical studies to better understand and identify the impact of Long COVID.


What are the common symptoms?

• Respiratory problems, fatigues and neurological symptoms may be some of the long-term effects.

• Meanwhile, patients who spend a long time in the hospital with any type of life-threatening illness do develop several of these conditions, such as fatigue and brain fog.

• A recent study published in The Lancet Psychiatry discovered that one in three COVID-19 survivors will experience a mental health or nerve-related illness within six months of a COVID-19 infection and that anxiety is among the most frequently reported symptoms.