Preprint How Long is Long COVID? Evaluation of Long-Term Health Status in Individuals Discharged from a Specialist Community Long COVID Service, 2024, Sivan+

Background: Post COVID-19 syndrome or Long Covid (LC) is a novel fluctuating condition with a protracted course in some patients. Specialist LC services have been operational in the UK since 2020 and deal with a high caseload of patients. Aims: To evaluate long-term outcomes in patients discharged from a community-based LC specialist service.

Methods: A service evaluation study that included patients who were well engaged in the services [completed the standard Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and received intervention from clinician(s)] and had been discharged for at least 3 months from the service. They consented to the study and completed standard PROMs: COVID-19 Yorkshire Rehabilitation Scale (C19-YRS), EQ-5D-5L, and National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) criteria for Myalgia Encephalomyelitis/ Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).

Results: Out of 460 patients contacted, 112 (average of 37.6 months since infection and 9.8 months post-discharge) completed the PROMs. 90.2% patients continued to experience LC symptoms and disability and had not returned to their pre-COVID health status. The average EQ-5D-5L index score was 0.53 (SD 0.29) highlighting a significant disability and that LC had become a long-term condition (LTC) in majority of patients who responded to the survey. 43% patients met the criteria for suspected ME/CFS.

Conclusion: A proportion of LC patients develop Persistent Long Covid (PLC) consistent with a LTC and had a significant overlap with ME/CFS.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202409.0813/download/final_file

 

Technically, it lasts as long as they allow it, until they decide to do something competent about it and end it. So it's one of those things where the outcome is determined by the behavior is determined by the outcome and so on and on like a mutually interacting force.

By choosing to do nothing, nothing competent anyway, it will last a lifetime for millions (although since all health care thinking is local, it's in however many people happen to have it under that jurisdiction). Having made different choices in the past, it wouldn't even have happened, would be trivial to treat.

All choices. Almost always the wrong ones.

 

This is the first time I’ve come across ‘Persistent Long Covid’ as a term. When people are prefixing an existing term with more synonyms, that seems like a bit of a red flag.

What’s next? Unremitting persistent long covid? Chronic unremitting persistent long covid? Chronic unremitting persistent long covid syndrome?