While the pandemic may be over, its enduring effects are being felt by millions.
While most people who test positive for COVID recover within a week or two, some continue to report symptoms — and even develop new ones — months and even years later.
Known as long Covid, this debilitating post-infection condition can cause severe fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, palpitations, dizziness, depression, brain fog, headaches, menstrual changes, and muscle pain.
Previous research estimated that 20 million Americans have long COVID; however, new research published in JAMA Network Open suggests that an additional 10 million Americans may be unknowingly suffering.
Researchers from Mass General Brigham used AI to build a comprehensive view of the lasting effects of COVID by analyzing nearly half a million medical records to track how many patients tested positive for COVID and later sought care for long COVID symptoms.
“We built an AI to map the post-pandemic reality, and it uncovered a 10 million-person blind spot in the American healthcare system,” said study author Hossein Estiri, leader of MGB’s clinical augmented intelligence research group.
Results show that while 16% of people who got COVID developed long-term symptoms, those symptoms are not always identified as such.
This latest tally of COVID patients with chronic symptoms is more than double that of some estimates, and nearly triples the figures suggested by the World Health Organization.
Estitiri’s figures are more consistent with a 2024 survey by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that 18% of U.S. adults experience long COVID.
Research shows that women, people with underlying health conditions, and those who did not receive a COVID vaccine are more likely to develop long COVID.
According to the CDC, long COVID can be difficult to diagnose or explain, as the condition is based entirely on symptoms that care providers tend to treat as individual issues, rather than comprehensive evidence of a broader condition.
“If someone has fatigue, it doesn’t really matter at the moment whether it’s a COVID-induced fatigue — the doctor just tries to treat the fatigue,” said Estitiri. “It’s really hard to connect the dots back to the roots. This is not how the healthcare system in general is designed to work.”
One limitation in diagnosing long COVID is the lack of a single test to determine whether a patient has the condition or has recovered from it.
Like chronic Lyme disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, COVID is poorly understood and often missed by medical professionals.
In addition to having their symptoms missed, many patients suffering from long COVID are misdiagnosed with mental health conditions like anxiety or depression that fail to address the breadth of their suffering.
Further, in addition to the constellation of symptoms associated with long COVID, researchers say many more could be related to it but are left unconnected by service providers.
“The cardiologist seeing new dysautonomia, the endocrinologist seeing new metabolic disease, the neurologist seeing unexplained cognitive complaints—some of these presentations are long COVID arriving without the label that would connect them to a COVID-19 infection,” said lead study author Jiazi Tian.
For his part, Estiri is hopeful that AI can close this gap and help long COVID patients receive the diagnostic care they need.
“Once we can distinguish different clinical and organ-specific manifestations of long COVID, we gain the ability to launch new trials and test targeted treatments for the right patients.”
And targeted treatment is of the utmost importance, as previous research found that long COVID may trigger Alzheimer ‘s-like changes in the brain.
In a bit of good amid the grim, research from earlier this year showed that taking metformin, a widely used diabetes medication, during or soon after a COVID infection can significantly reduce the risk of developing long COVID.
Meanwhile, LSD and psilocybin therapies have shown promising results in treating patients with long COVID.
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