2022 was the year long COVID’s burden grew clearer.
One key question is: Who is at risk? The search for risk factors has yielded few clear answers.Part of what confounds simple answers is that long COVID can hit multiple body systems, leading to fatigue,Symptoms could be due to persistent virus hiding out in the body, as well as the body’s responses to the intruder. Micro blood clots, antibodies that turn against the body, inflammation and even disturbances of helpful bacteria are all being scrutinized for their roles in the disease.
What’s perhaps most useful, Duggal says, is to consider how many people are severely constrained by their illness. “These are the people [who] were living happy, healthy lives and now they’re not,” she says. About 1 to 5 percent of people who had COVID-19 may fall into this category, she estimates. That sounds like a tiny number, she says, but “even if it’s 1 percent, it’s 1 percent of all people who have had COVID. And that’s just a really, really large number.
In the first days of the pandemic, Duggal and colleagues wanted to collect as much biological data on people as they could, before COVID-19 tore through the world. But logistics and a lack of funding prevented those baseline studies. “Had we had some of that in place, we could now be asking better questions and getting better answers,” she says.
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