What Scientists Know About Long COVID, 3 Years In – By Jessica Rendall & Dan Avery (CNET) / Mar 6, 2023
A puzzling disease left millions of patients trying to piece it together. Research is ongoing, but some causes and potential treatments are taking shape.
For many people, what started out as a relatively mild case of COVID-19 persisted into a lingering condition that took weeks or months before their suffering subsided — some are yet to fully recover. They live with long COVID, a condition health care providers have struggled to understand and accurately diagnose since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020.
While it’s hard to put a number on what percentage of people will develop long COVID, since home tests and mild cases contribute to inaccurate case counts, somewhere between 10% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 but didn’t need to be hospitalized, and 50 to 70% of people who were hospitalized, developed some degree of long COVID, according to a major review of long COVID research published earlier this year in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
Fortunately, rates of long COVID, also called “long-haul COVID” or “post-COVID conditions”, may be declining. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the number of people who reported COVID-19 symptoms that lasted longer than three months, currently or in the past, declined from 35% in June 2022 to 28% in Jan. 2023.
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