The term ‘long COVID’ should be ditched, according to new Australian research that found no evidence that COVID-19 is more likely to inflict long-term impairment than the flu.
Long COVID is indistinguishable from other post-viral syndromes and the term should be ditched, say researchers who found similar rates of long-term impairment between people who caught COVID-19 and those who were sick from other respiratory illnesses.
The researchers concluded there was no evidence that a COVID-19 infection made impairment more likely. Gerrard said long COVID appeared to be a severe and distinct disease simply because of the huge number of infections during the pandemic. The research will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in April, but it hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Former chief health officer of Victoria Dr Brett Sutton, who now steers health and biosecurity research at the CSIRO, described the new findings as robust but said it should be up to people with long COVID to decide how their condition is described.“I think there’s a necessity to make sure that they feel seen and heard and understood as a cohort who continue to suffer,” Sutton said.
“I felt really frustrated by the fact they’re saying causes unnecessary fear and is ‘probably harmful’ because it really undermines the seriousness of the long COVID,” Watts said.“Long COVID really does describe what happens to oneself. It was triggered by COVID and you have this long tail of ensuing illness.”
Jeremy Nicholson, professor of medicine at Murdoch University, said without lab analysis of the patients in Gerrard’s study or knowing for sure that long COVID is not physiologically different to other post-viral syndromes, the evidence to dismiss it as distinct condition is not there.
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