Long COVID has caused or contributed to at least 3,500 deaths in the United States, an analysis of death certificates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
The study, published Wednesday, is believed to be the first nationwide examination of whether long COVID or related terms appear in official American death records. While it found that such phrases were recorded in only a tiny proportion of the more than 1 million deaths tied to infection with the coronavirus, the researchers and other experts said the results added to growing recognition of how serious long-term post-COVID medical problems can be.
“This new research is important in raising a concern, but it should be followed with more definitive work,” said Dr. Jeffrey Martin, chief of the division of clinical epidemiology in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.
The study found that some of the long COVID patterns related to age, sex, race and ethnicity differed from those seen in deaths caused by the initial infection. For example, while Black and Hispanic people had higher death rates from the initial coronavirus infection than non-Hispanic whites, those groups did not have higher death rates related to long COVID, the study found.
He said the study appeared to be primarily capturing deaths of people who experienced serious initial infection with the coronavirus and who survived that phase but went on to have organ damage and other severe complications. He said other deaths related to long COVID should be studied, including deaths by suicide of people who had devastating post-COVID symptoms.
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