![]() ![]() She says the issue of long COVID will be huge on a global scale and it's crucial to understand it better. One of Australia's leading researchers in the area, Professor Gail Matthews, says long COVID is likely a spectrum of different pathologies.ĭr Matthews is the Head of Infectious Diseases at St Vincent's Hospital and Head of the Therapeutic Vaccine and Research Program at the Kirby Institute at UNSW. Those with long COVID report a constellation of symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath, brain fog, memory loss, loss of taste and smell, numbness, muscle spasms and irritable bowels. The longer-term symptoms can strike even those who had few initial symptoms. Studies have consistently found long COVID to be more prevalent in women, older people and those with underlying conditions, but there's evidence to indicate children are capable of developing long COVID too.īeing young and fit is no guarantee you're safe either, and nor is having a minor initial COVID case. It's been likened to a kind of " Russian roulette". The uncertainty doesn't end there. We also have no idea why long COVID hits certain people, but not others. Of the 3,000 people surveyed, 4.8 per cent still had symptoms after three months. Researchers tracked 94 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in NSW from January to May 2020. It's important to remember these studies vary in method, with some tracking only hospitalised cases and some relying on self-reported surveys.Ī comprehensive study by the University of NSW places the figure at around 5 per cent. Various studies over the past 18 months estimate long COVID can affect anywhere from 2.3 per cent to 76 per cent of COVID-19 cases. To this day, we still know very little about long COVID, including just how many people it affects. The memory loss was especially unnerving. ![]() "And then it would feel like it would flip on itself continuously and so it makes it really hard to sleep because you're lying there and it feels like your brain is doing somersaults and then it's also spinning." "It's as if there was like a mini person in my brain and he was scraping my whole brain with a rake, it was just pain," Freya says. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization released its clinical case definition of what it calls 'post COVID-19 condition', which affects people at least two months after a COVID-19 infection with symptoms that "cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis".įor Freya, symptoms like chest pain and a sore throat were manageable, but the dizziness and "brain pain" she experienced were debilitating. It's not an official medical term it was coined out of necessity by the public. It's sometimes also referred to as long-haul COVID, chronic COVID and post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC).Įxactly what constitutes long COVID remains extremely broad. By April 2020, "long COVID" was being mentioned in Facebook support groups.
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