Long Covid may be nothing unique in the future – but its effects today are still very real | Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz

While the long-term risk from a current infection is 10 times less than it was in 2020-21, a lot of people are still suffering after getting Covid early in the pandemic

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Long Covid is one of the most controversial topics remaining about the pandemic. Depending on who you ask, it is either a real and current threat to the health of the globe, or a relatively minor issue that we should pay little attention to in the future. It is hard to weigh in on the topic without passionate advocates taking issue with the things that you say, which is true of quite a lot of the conversations we have had over the course of the pandemic.

A recent study from Queensland has injected further discord into this already complicated space. The press release about the study says that, in a large observational study, people who had tested positive for Covid-19 when the Omicron variant was spreading were no more likely to report ongoing symptoms or serious problems in their daily life than either people who tested negative or those who tested positive for influenza. This follows similar previous work by the same team showing almost identical results. According to Dr John Gerrard, one of the authors of the paper and Queensland’s chief health officer, the findings call into question the entire conceptualisation of long Covid, arguing that it may be “time to stop using terms like ‘long Covid’”.