Long COVID continues to be a moving target – continuously evolving and still surprising doctors and patients who have sometimes incapacitating long-term symptoms.
Little about the disorder seems predictable at this point. People can have long COVID after asymptomatic, mild, or severe COVID-19, for example. And when a person gets long COVID – also known as long-haul COVID – symptoms can vary widely.
To address all the uncertainty, the New York State Department of Health gathered experts in primary care, pediatrics, physical medicine, rehabilitation, and pulmonology to answer some pressing questions.
New York in 2020 was the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, making it also the center of the long COVID epidemic, says Emily Lutterloh, MD, director of the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Department of Health.
What do you do when you’re seeing a patient with long COVID for the first time?
The first exam varies because there are so many different ways long COVID presents itself, says Benjamin Abramoff, MD, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.
I’ve now been seriously ill with #LongCovid for 11 months. I was never hospitalized. I didn’t even have a “mild” covid case. Instead, I developed Long Covid from an asymptomatic infection.
I’m far from unique. Up to 1/5 of asymptomatic patients go on to have long-term symptoms.
— Ravi Veriah Jacques (@RaviHVJ) February 3, 2022
Assessing their previous and current care also helps to direct their ongoing management, says Zijian Chen, MD, medical director of the Center for Post-COVID Care at Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
Can vaccination help people with long COVID?
Anything that we can do to help prevent people from being critically ill or being hospitalized with COVID-19 is helpful to prevent long COVID, says Dr. Abramoff, who is also director of the long COVID clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
“So that’s something I always discuss with patients. In some research, sometimes patients do feel better after the vaccine,” he says.
What kind of therapies do you find helpful for your patients?
Rehabilitation is a key part of recovery from long COVID, Dr. Abramoff says. “It is very important to make this very patient-specific.”
“We have patients that are working. They’re already going to the gym in some cases but don’t feel like they have the same endurance,” he says. “And then we have patients who are so crippled by their fatigue that they can’t get out of bed.”
1/ What is #LongCOVID?!
A disabling malady from ongoing inflammation, autoimmunity, & potential viral reservoirs (GI, brain?)
NEW DATA: The Lungs “light up” on special MRI Scans 3 to 9 months later in patients never hospitalized for COVID.https://t.co/I2kyZ4cK5F pic.twitter.com/dL1P67L2DK
— WesElyMD (@WesElyMD) February 2, 2022
An exercise program can help people who have long COVID.
“There’s a big role for therapy services in the recovery of these patients,” says John Baratta, MD, of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
But the limited number of long COVID clinics can mean some people are unable to get to therapists trained on the needs of patients with lingering COVID symptoms. Educating community physical and occupational therapists is one solution.